


Hard Wired, Part I

by Muriel_Perun



Series: Hard Wired [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bullying, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming Out, Developing Relationship, Eventual Romance, Explicit Sexual Content, Loki makes everything hard for himself, M/M, Mean practical jokes, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Rape Fantasy, The Avengers (2012) Compliant, Thor: The Dark World Compliant, dubcon, non-con fantasy, past bullying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-22 23:11:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12492976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muriel_Perun/pseuds/Muriel_Perun
Summary: Feeling out of joint with time and with everyone around him, in denial about his sexuality, Steve Rogers struggles with loneliness. Stuck in Odin's prison, going slowly mad, Loki finds a way to make a tenuous connection. A simple conversation leads to a relationship that will have a profound impact on both men, on the Avengers, and on the fate of the earth.





	1. Chapter 1

What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?   
—Theodore Roethke

The wound is the place where light enters you.  
—Rumi

 

Odin’s dungeons were never quiet.

The Einherjahr marched tirelessly up and down, up and down, at all hours of the day and night, making the halls ring with their heavy, self-important tread. You could set a clock by their comings and goings. As soon as you closed your eyes, as soon as it almost grew quiet enough to think, the halls would start echoing again with their ceaseless steps. Loki even heard them in his dreams.

Odin’s dungeons were never dark. 

The Allfather had made his prison a great, grim panopticon—not through necessity, but out of cruelty, Loki conjectured. Prowling like wild beasts in their boxes of light, his prisoners must always be visible, never having the privilege of solitude, their cells lit like the skyscraper windows in that faraway city, New York, scene of Loki’s last defeat. As if anyone could escape from this hole, even in the dark. The magic that had created his cell and held it secure had been woven so tightly it could never be broken.

Sometimes Loki dreamed of the quiet, empty space that he had found beneath the Bifrost as he fell and fell, twisting in horror over what he’d done, the act he’d thought irrevocable until he landed in Chitauri space. When the Chitauri started taking him apart, he had longed for Asgard.

Now he remained in captivity, biding his time, but in truth he knew he would never leave unless Odin let him go. He had tried every spell, every charm, every galdr—chanting each incantation nine times, as he had learned long ago. He had tried finesse and he had tried brute strength. He had focused every bit of seidr he possessed into the effort to escape, and yet the shimmering field of energy that trapped him in the cell had not even trembled by his efforts.

It was a great humiliation: the trickster, the dreaded mage, trapped in a web of seidr that he could not break. He suspected that Frigga and the healers, the völver, had some hand in it, but she refused to discuss it with him, smiling that secret little smile he knew so well. She would defy Odin to visit him, projecting her image from her aerie, high in the castle tower, to the depths of Loki’s prison. Through her trusted guards, she would send him books, and sweetmeats, and fine liqueurs, but she would not help him escape. 

And, even so, frustrated as he was, he did not reject her visits. His crimes had cut him off from everyone else in the universe. No longer could Loki rail at Thor or defy Odin until his one eye turned dark with fury, and the ravens cawed hoarsely enough to drown him out. Now he remained alone with his thoughts, and bitter company they were. Frigga’s visits provided the only distraction, the only contact he had. If he lost them he knew he would go mad; he felt half mad already.

He often thought of the Avengers—that little band of mortals, with the addition of his brother—who had defeated him. He could do nothing from here except conduct imaginary conversations with them in his head. But one day it occurred to him that, if Frigga could project her image to him, perhaps he also could project himself to others, as long as he was discreet, as long as Odin never found out and repaired the flaw in his prison’s wall.

So he started to try to project his image to Midgard, concentrating on Stark Tower, and on the only one of the Avengers he had been able to vanquish. Not Tony Stark, full of bravado and bluster, trying to beat Loki at his own game; not the woman, with her cold, provocative sexuality; not the Hawk, who knew him too well; and certainly not the Monster—what would be the use? Not Thor either, once his closest companion, now his bitterest enemy. No, he would speak to Captain America, the man out of time—so serious and yet so vulnerable, so ridiculous in his tight suit with his shield painted in concentric circles like a bright flag. He would speak to Steve Rogers, who might be naive enough to listen.

***

“Steven Rogers.” The voice wasn’t loud, but it had been distinct, every syllable clearly enunciated. 

Steve sat up in bed. It was 3:00 a.m. on the dot and pitch dark. There was no moon outside the unshaded window, but there were city lights, and his night vision was pretty good. As far as he could tell, there was no one in the room beside himself. Had it been a dream? Sometimes he awoke at night thinking he heard his mother’s voice, but this had not been her.

Swinging his feet to the floor, he turned on the lamp. Unlike everyone else in the building, he refused to put his room lights on voice command. It seemed lazy, and downright silly, in a way, to ask a mechanical man to do something you could do perfectly well yourself. 

Walking into the bathroom, he relieved himself, then splashed cold water on his face and drank some from his cupped hands. He wondered if he should tell the others about the voice. Tony had been telling him he was wound too tight, but who wouldn’t be wound tight with these continual menaces from outer space showing up in New York, and all the things he’d had to adjust to from his displacement in time? If he told them, they’d just try to get him to go to a psychologist again. Banner had one he kept recommending. No matter how real that voice had seemed, it was just a dream.

His face looked pale and anxious in the glass. He wondered if he’d be able to go back to sleep, but when he lay in bed he dropped off immediately. In the morning, he barely remembered the incident.

***  
The next night the Tower’s fire alarm went off at 3:16 a.m. and again at 4:45. Jarvis had no explanation for it. Tony swore a blue streak and called an inspector to come the next day to check the system.

***

The night after that Steve must have dreamed about the Battle of New York, because he awoke and thought he saw Loki standing there, in the center of the room, wearing his gold and green battle armor and horned helmet. But when he’d blinked and shaken his head, the illusion disappeared. He couldn’t remember dreaming, but the image of Loki had been clear as day. 

Was this what the head-shrinkers called shellshock, or—what did they call it now?—Post-Traumatic Stress? He knew Tony had been struggling with that for a while because Pepper told him. Maybe he had it too. 

And then he realized with a shock that the voice he had heard two nights before had been Loki’s. It was 3:32 in the morning.

The next day he ended up telling Tony, who first checked with Jarvis that no intruders had been inside his room or anywhere else in the Tower any of the three nights, while Thor contacted Asgard to make sure that Loki was still in his cell. Then everyone made his life miserable for a day. 

“Sure,” Tony said, “Loki’s pretty, but—” Cries of protest and derision greeted his remark. 

Steve’s heart skipped a beat. Were they just joking, or did they know he was attracted to men? Not that he could be interested in Loki, but....

“Loki’s pretty?” Hawkeye snorted. “You have something else you want to tell us, Stark?”

“Come on,” Tony said, “hear me out. I was going to say that—objectively—Loki’s not bad looking”—here Bruce whistled provocatively—“not to my taste, you understand, but if Steve wants to dream, he should be dreaming about that hoard of groupies that tries to get in here every day. They’re way prettier than Loki.” Tony gestured an hourglass form in the air, while Natasha raised her eyebrows, shaking her head in mock disapproval.

“One of them almost got past the Tower security last week,” Natasha said. “Some night you’ll come home and find one in your bed, Steve. Would that be so bad? Aw, how sweet! He’s blushing.”

Steve breathed again. It was just the usual teasing, the same stupid jibes they always aimed at each other. If Pepper had been here, she would have stopped it at about this point by diverting Tony’s attention, but she and Tony were “taking a break,” which usually meant that she would be gone for a few weeks until Tony’s increasingly desperate promises to change convinced her to return.

“But maybe you’d rather have Loki after all,” Hawkeye said, laying a hand on Steve’s arm, which he quickly shook off. “By now I’m sure he’s recovered from that bashing the Other Guy gave him. He’s been in prison a year or so—hey, I bet you’d look pretty good to him, too.” 

Everyone thought this was hilariously funny except Steve and Thor. “Hey, it’s his brother,” Steve said softly to Clint, who laughed and told him that Thor and Loki weren’t really brothers, and, besides, Thor had gotten over it, but that wasn’t what Steve saw in Thor’s face. 

In his heart, Steve knew that he was more likely to dream of a beautiful man than of any of the women who fantasized about him. That didn’t used to be acceptable in his day, so he had always tried to pretend to ignore the guys and concentrate on the ladies, who never gave him a second look anyway, except for Peggy. These days, being gay was supposed to be fine, but hearing Tony and the others sneer about what people used to call—at best—“homosexuality,” minus most of the nasty name-calling he’d heard in the army, Steve wondered if gay equality was all it was cracked up to be. In any case, he thought of Loki as a homicidal monster, so seeing him as beautiful seemed a stretch. 

Tony, Clint, and Nat mistook his anger for embarrassment and talked about his blushes until he was sick of the whole lot of them. They kept it up for a day or two, and then suddenly stopped. Steve was grateful for the respite until one night, when he woke in the small hours of the morning to the sight of a stripper doing a pole dance right in the middle of his room. Like most of Tony’s crude holograms, it blinked and fuzzed and pixilated here and there, but the immediate effect of coming out of a deep sleep to a bright eyeful of naked female flesh was deeply shocking and embarrassing.

Leaping out of bed, Steve ripped every one of Jarvis’s feeds right out of the wall.

As he lay down in bed and tried to relax enough to go back to sleep, his streetwise Brooklyn instincts kicked into high gear. That vision of Loki in his armor must have been a hologram, too. They’d gotten Steve that time, but trust Tony to overdo it. For all Steve knew, Tony and Bruce had cooked up a Loki hologram and had Jarvis project it as a practical joke to force him to go to some crony of theirs who was posing as a shrink. If they’d been able to resist waking him up with the stripper, it might even have worked.

He sighed and wondered, not for the first time, why the team that he trusted with his life in battle acted so immature in everyday life. They’d played worse pranks than this on him and on each other. The others seemed to take it all as good fellowship, but after all the bullying he’d been through in his childhood, Steve didn’t see it that way. 

Well, he’d torn the feeds out of the walls and verified that Loki was safely in jail. End of story. Steve just wanted to do his job and be left in peace. He rolled over and, flinging one arm around the pillow, dropped off to sleep.

***

Several nights went by without any disturbance. The fire-alarm inspector found nothing amiss. Steve was well on his way to forgetting that anything had ever happened, except that he felt better knowing that no one could look in on him when he was alone in his room.

***

He woke up at 4:47 a.m. by the clock on a bright, moonlit night. Between him and the window, he thought he saw a shadow waver. When he turned on the lamp, the image blinked out for a second like a defective hologram and then came into focus. It was Loki, dressed in deep forest green, sitting on an ornate chair that Steve didn’t own.

“What the hell, Tony?” Steve cried. “Don’t you think this joke is getting a little old?”

“Are you having vision problems?” Loki asked with a frown. “Oh, I see, you suspect that Stark is teasing you with my image. Let me assure you that he is not.”

“Then how do you explain—how can you be here? A week ago Thor said you were still in Asgard,” he said cautiously, trying to stay calm and think. Rising, he moved cautiously towards the door, where his shield hung on a hook. “How did you escape?”

“Alas, I am in Asgard,” Loki said, smiling the ghost of a smile. “I continue to rot in the dungeon where Odin threw me. Can’t you guess what you’re seeing?”

“No,” Steve said baldly. Stepping back quickly, he grabbed his shield and swept it through Loki’s image, expecting to feel resistance, but he felt nothing against his arm, and the image never wavered. He stumbled and barely caught himself from sprawling at Loki’s feet. Loki sat calmly, watching him, smirking in a way that made Steve’s blood boil.

Feeling foolish, he tossed the shield on the bed and, keeping one eye on Loki, went to check the feeds. None had been repaired. He walked around the image and saw that it looked real from every angle, unlike one of Tony’s crude holos. 

“No,” Loki repeated indulgently, “you have no idea. Would you like to know?”

Steve did want to know, urgently, but felt he was being led, and he didn’t like that. “Why contact me?” he asked, feeling at a loss. How did you fight an incorporeal foe? Insubstantial as it was, the image looked entirely real, and that alone kept Steve on edge.

“Ah,” Loki said, smiling more broadly, “an excellent question. I chose you because I had no desire to speak to any of the others.”

“How flattering,” Steve said wryly, trying to hide his fear as he sat back cautiously on his bed, with his shield close at hand. Now that he was starting to believe he was actually talking to Loki, he thought about rushing out into the hall to call for help, but decided against it for the moment. He was glad he had donned pajama bottoms this night instead of sleeping in his underwear or in the nude as he sometimes did, now that the feeds were gone. 

Loki considered for a moment. “As you might imagine, I have no desire to speak to the Monster again, even as a mental projection, although…” He paused. “It might be instructive to set him loose inside Stark Tower.” Loki’s eyes were riveted on Steve’s face as if lying in wait for any reaction, no matter how small. “I’ve already spent enough of my life talking to Thor. And then there is the woman.”

“You mean Agent Romanov.”

“The very one.” Loki’s tone was artificial and exaggerated, as if he’d practiced these lines in front of a mirror. Steve was starting to feel less afraid than annoyed with the whole performance. “I already had my little chat with her on the carrier. Once was enough. And her cohort, Hawkeye—well, I know him inside out, of course.”

“And Tony?” Steve asked, figuring this was going to be the punch line.

“He offered me a drink and then refused to give it to me. And he might be a bit miffed at me because I tossed him out his own window.”

Loki seemed very satisfied with himself, but Steve was becoming more and more irritated. “So, why me?” 

Loki shrugged. “I’ve hardly spoken to you. I thought it might make a nice change.”

Steve was losing patience fast. “We spoke plenty in Stuttgart.”

Loki’s eyes widened slightly in surprise. That wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. “Briefly. And then—as you mortals say—I kicked your ass.”

“We captured you.”

“Ha!” Loki’s skeptical laugh was one percussive syllable. “Only because I wanted to be captured,” he continued, as if explaining things to a mental deficient. “I had to get on the carrier somehow.” He shrugged again. “You were so weak that it wouldn’t have been plausible if I’d let you overcome me. I had to wait for Stark, and even so, it was a bit absurd of me to surrender to him like that. And then Thor—”

“And then Thor kicked your—”

It was Loki’s turn to be annoyed. “I was supposed to be a prisoner and I had to wait ages for Stark and Thor to stop posturing. I could have been halfway to Vanaheim if I’d wanted to go. None of you would ever have found me.”

“And yet you stayed,” Steve said skeptically.

“And none of you figured out why,” Loki shot back.

The banter was wearing on Steve’s nerves. He decided to try asking a direct question. “Why did you do it? Why did you call the Chitauri down on New York? You must have known you couldn’t win.”

Loki’s eyes lit up with interest. “That’s the most intelligent thing you’ve asked yet. I was beginning to think I’d come millions of parsecs in vain, but there seems to be hope yet for this conversation.”

“So? Will you answer the question?” Steve put a challenge into his tone.

Loki leaned forward as if preparing to confide a secret. “I hate to admit it, but I was coerced. I did exactly what they told me to do, and so we lost, of course. If I’d planned it myself—well, suffice it to say that I wouldn’t be the one in the cell.”

Steve realized that he’d been talking with Loki for 10 minutes now, and the man hadn’t moved from his chair and hadn’t made a threatening gesture. His legs were crossed and he looked entirely relaxed. If he wanted to talk about the Chitauri, then why not continue this for a little while? They’d never been able to get anything out of him before. Thor implied that Loki had been tortured once he’d reached Asgard, but that he still hadn’t provided any details.

“Why are you telling me this?” Steve asked warily. “Why wouldn’t you tell Odin or Thor? Maybe your sentence would have been reduced.”

“Of course I wouldn’t tell Thor,” Loki sighed. “He’s my brother. More or less. And Odin wouldn’t care what I said.” He rolled his eyes. “I told Frigga a few things.”

“Frigga?”

“Odin’s consort.”

“Your mother.”

“Thor’s mother.”

“She raised you.”

“Do you want to parse my family tree, or do you want to know about the Chitauri?”

Steve scoffed. “The Chitauri, if you really are Loki. A mental projection from Asgard, you said?”

“We’re back to that again,” Loki said sadly, shaking his head. “And I thought we had made such progress.” He put one hand to his mouth and yawned theatrically. “I have other things to attend to now. We can continue another night.”

“What if I tell Thor?”

“I wondered if you’d ask that. Well, in that case, Thor tells Odin and they find a way to stop me from projecting my mind through the World Tree—‘astral projection,’ as it is ridiculously called on Midgard. It took me a few tries to get the range right, by the way, and then a few more tries to avoid setting off Stark’s alarms,” he added confidentially. “And then Odin will discover that Frigga has been projecting her mind to me, and he’ll stop her from coming, and my life will suddenly become so much more tedious.”

“Do you expect me to feel sorry for you?” If this had been a phone call, Steve would have been ready to hang up. How did you hang up on a mental projection?

Loki deflected this question with another. “How long is a human life?”

“What?”

“An average human life. Not yours.” Loki steepled his fingers and touched them to his lower lip.

“Around eighty years, or a hundred at most, but not everyone makes it that far. I have no idea what the average is.” This whole encounter was beyond surreal. Steve was tired of being thrown off balance. He felt as if he were playing a game without knowing the rules. 

“So a life sentence on Midgard is generally on the order of thirty years, maybe fifty or sixty in an extreme case?” Steve nodded. “Do you know how long my life will be, and therefore my sentence?”

Steve thought about it for the first time. “Thousands...?” he ventured.

“Five thousand, maybe six. The best I can hope for is that Odin dies, and Thor becomes king and leads Asgard into a reckless war. Then perhaps I shall live to see the citadel fall into ruins around me, and I will at last be free.” Loki’s eyes looked haunted, and his voice was fainter now, as if heard over a great distance. “I tire of this. I shall return another night, unless you’ve run and told Thor, of course.” His image blinked out between one heartbeat and the next. 

Steve sat and stared at the space where Loki had been, feeling unaccountably sad. Maybe it was all that talk about human life spans. He thought of Peggy, confined to her bed, well over 100 now. No one knew how long Steve would live, but it was likely he would be around long after everyone he knew—save Bruce, and Loki and Thor—was gone. He hadn’t aged at all during the 70 years he’d spent in the ice—not physically, anyway. Emotionally, especially lately, sometimes he felt every one of his hundred and two years.

He thought about raising the alarm, of telling his friends that Loki had spoken to him, but the idea of fighting through their disbelief and ridicule again made him tired. Loki was safely incarcerated in Asgard, and he was bored, but his “mental projection” had seemed harmless enough. Chances were he’d eventually try contacting the other members of the team. Let them deal with it then.

He thought of Loki sitting in his prison cell all those eons, waiting for Asgard to fall. He thought of himself in fifty years, still gazing out at Brooklyn from the windows of Stark Tower. Did Loki have a view from his prison, too, he wondered?

Thinking of time stretching out before him made him wonder again how he could find or forge a place in this new world where he’d landed. After expecting to die, he’d woken up in a place where people lied and manipulated each other as easily as breathing. Those things had probably existed before, but somehow the sides had seemed pretty clear back in his day. The first moment he’d been awake he’d been lied to, and he was sure it would have continued if they hadn’t made the error about the baseball game, and if he hadn’t escaped into twenty-first century New York. Nick Fury had been forced to be straight with him, but Steve often wondered what S.H.I.E.L.D.’s original long-term plans for him had been. 

And then there was his personal life, or the lack of one. Sometimes, when he was alone in his room, staring out the windows at Brooklyn, he thought of Peggy, as he had known her during the war, and fantasized about taking her to bed. Peggy was an old woman now, and she had once said with a twinkle in her eye that she hoped he sometimes still remembered her when she was young and beautiful. She’d be shocked if she knew she was the only woman he ever thought of, the only one who had ever excited him. But how could he start a relationship with anyone, when he knew that in a few decades they’d be gone, and he’d still be young? How could Thor and Jane stand the thought of what awaited them? 

The eastern sky was turning pink and gold. Lowering the shade, Steve got back in bed and slept until 10.


	2. Chapter 2

There might have been a hush in the conversation as he walked into the common room, but Steve was almost sure he had imagined it. Then, from behind, Tony’s hand landed heavily on his shoulder.

“Do we have a surprise for you!” he said cheerily.

Clint put a cup of hot coffee into Cap’s right hand, grinning at him in a way that was guaranteed to arouse suspicion.

“I think your surprise the other night was plenty,” Steve said, immediately feeling stupid for bringing it up. He hadn’t wanted to discuss the pole dance hologram with anyone, just to let it fade into the past. Tony must have known that the feeds had been torn out of the walls, and that should have told him how his joke had been received. Sitting on the sofa, Steve took an experimental sip of the coffee to gauge its temperature.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Tony said, glancing at Bruce, who was sitting on a barstool drinking orange juice, “it got a little out of hand. It was all the green man’s idea...”

“The hell it was,” Bruce interjected amiably.

Tony ignored him. “So I planned something to make it up to you.”

“No need,” Steve said curtly, trying not to sound unfriendly. The coffee was good and hot. He thought about going into the kitchen and frying up some eggs to go with it. When he started to rise, Tony immediately got in front of him as if trying to keep him in the room. Steve sank back down into the couch cushions with a sigh.

“But it’s something good,” Tony went on, wheedling a little. “It’s something you want.”

Steve sighed again. “Okay, what?”

“It’s a date,” Tony announced triumphantly. “Tonight.”

“With a girl,” Clint added, smirking.

Damn it, Steve felt his cheeks begin to glow. He was sure that’s what they were all aiming for. He rose this time despite Tony, intending to take his coffee back to his room and drink it in peace. He’d get some food later.

“Her name is Sherri,” Tony said. “She’s a blonde, which is good, right? And she’s quite a fan of yours.”

“Tony,” Steve began and then trailed off, not quite sure what to say. He felt flustered and upset, wondering whether they were playing another trick on him or if they were actually making a kind gesture. Either way, he didn’t intend to accept it.

“You can’t let the poor kid down,” Tony said firmly, laying a paternal hand on Steve’s arm.

“Is she one of the girls who hangs around the Tower?” Steve asked suspiciously. “You know I don’t really want my identity out there.”

“No, no, she’s a waitress at that burger place over in Times Square—you know, where we went a few weeks ago?”

Steve tried and failed to remember who had waited on them then. He remembered that the burger had been good, and the Yankees game had been on in the bar. Aside from that, he was drawing a blank.

“Anyway, she didn’t wait on us, but she noticed you. I went there again yesterday, and she asked me who you were. Apparently you made a big impression. And so I said, sure, you’d be happy to go out with her.”

“No thanks, Tony,” Steve said. Breaking Tony’s grip, he walked into the kitchen. Finishing his coffee, he rinsed his cup in the sink and put it in the drainer.

“Look, you have to go,” Tony said, frowning. “I set up the date, but I didn’t get her phone number. You wouldn’t stand her up, would you?”

“What’s her last name?” Steve asked. “I can go over to the restaurant and ask them to give her a message.”

Tony shrugged. “You don’t want to do that. Just think how disappointed she’ll be. Come on, it’ll be fun. You’re picking her up in front of the joint. And I got reservations for you at Little Sorrento. I know you like that place. You’ll have a few blocks to walk, strike up a conversation, right? Then you’ll have a nice Italian dinner and you’ll take her home, and who knows what might happen?”

Bruce and Clint were letting Tony do the heavy lifting, but they were both smirking at Steve from the bar. He wished they’d just leave him alone. In the end, Steve was so tired of hearing Tony wheedle, as Clint and Bruce grinned knowingly, that he finally gave in.

***

Steve expected Sherri to come from inside the restaurant, so when she arrived behind him and tapped him on the arm, he was thoroughly rattled. She was pretty, with lank blond hair that hung to her shoulders, and she wore a simple chocolate brown dress that fell to her knee with a tailored jacket. Steve was pleasantly surprised at how sweet and natural she seemed. She took his arm lightly and immediately set him at ease with some idle talk about the weather until he managed to get control of his nerves.

“I hope you didn’t think I was too forward,” she said, “asking Mr. Stark if you were single. I thought you looked like a nice guy.”

Steve babbled a little over a thank-you and then felt like a dope. He fell back on safer ground. “How long have you been working at the restaurant?”

“Just a year. When the tips are good, it’s an okay living. But the tourists are rude sometimes. I’m looking for another job.” She laughed and looked up at his face. “You see, I’m putting myself through art school. Does that seem silly to you?”

“Why would it?”

“A lot of guys would say, ‘Why bother? You’re just going to get married.’”

“I would never say that,” Steve said seriously. That’s what men used to say back in his day, but knowing Peggy had taught him the callous stupidity of that way of thinking. “You should find work that you like,” he added. “Why should men be the only ones who enjoy their work?”

“Mr. Stark said that you were a handyman around Stark Tower, but that you were an artist, too,” she said shyly as they reached Little Sorrento. Steve was glad that the disruption of arriving at the restaurant and asking for the reservation covered the surprise and amusement he felt to be described as a “handyman.”

They were seated at a nice table near the window. The linens were crisp and cool to his hand, and the candle threw a warm glow over Sherri’s face and hair. The neon signs from Times Square were close enough to reflect a rainbow of colors down the crowded street. Leave it to Tony to know how to set up a perfectly romantic situation.

Watching Sherri smile as she looked around the restaurant and then met his eyes, Steve wondered if it would work this time, if he would find a woman he could care about again, that he could be attracted to, even a little bit, like Peggy. He glanced out the window at a high-end, touristy clothing store across the street, where a male model lounged in the doorway, wearing nothing but a pair of skin-tight jeans. He was young, and buff, with a shock of dark hair that brushed his shoulders as he vogued for a trio of passing girls. A pang of arousal stung Steve’s groin. Here he was, sitting at a table with a beautiful woman who was smiling at him, and a nameless model across the street was what turned him on. Once again, it wasn’t going to work. No matter how pleasant this dinner turned out to be, Steve doubted that he and Sherri would ever be more than friends.

Their meal was remarkably comfortable, despite Steve’s unease that he had gone on this date under false pretenses. Sherri was nice. He didn’t want to get her hopes up, but, hey, maybe she was thinking the same thing about him. He shouldn’t assume that she was falling head over heels for a handyman she’d seen once in a burger place.

They talked about their families and their backgrounds. Steve’s update of his actual story came out of his mouth pretty smoothly now. It contained few actual lies, but it skirted the truth in several areas. He told himself that his identity as Captain America was a matter of national security, and that salved his conscience somewhat, but a vague sense of guilt lingered, so he said as little as possible, concentrating on her story and demurring when asked about his “Iraq War” experience.

They found common ground when they spoke about art. Although she was studying fashion design, Sherri was very knowledgeable about art history and had been to the major museums. As it turned out, they had similar taste, and both were a little bewildered by modern conceptual art. Steve enjoyed their conversation, letting down his guard. And then, as naturally as could be, Sherri invited him to her apartment to look at her sketchbook.

He told himself he would just stay briefly, that he’d look at the sketches and go. He wouldn’t make a move, of course, so she couldn’t possibly misunderstand his intentions. If she asked him, he’d have to tell her, he’d be honest. Otherwise, he’d say good night and leave it at that.

Her apartment was way downtown in Soho in a co-op up an impressive number of stories in one of the converted nineteenth-century warehouses with cast-iron facades. The street was lively with galleries and bars. The people looked young and artistic. Steve didn’t often envy others, but he wondered what it would feel like to be one of these self-confident, hip people, to belong to this art scene. How different it would be to dedicate himself to art, instead of to the defense of the world. This was his “road not taken.” He could understand why Sherri enjoyed living here.

Her impossibly small apartment contained a sofa and a coffee table, with a small alcove for a kitchen and a double bed above them in a loft. Steve’s shins hit the table as he sat on the sofa. He felt confined and uneasy and wondered why he had talked himself into coming here.

A moment later he forgot his anxieties when he opened one of two black-covered sketchbooks she handed him. The first contained pencil and charcoal renderings of nudes, obviously from a class. Her work was fine. She had a bold, clear line and a good sense of proportion. In the second book Steve found a hint of who she really was. These were her own drawings, not made for an assignment. Most were portraits in which the features were finely modeled, cleverly showing individual personalities and inner feelings; some were of animals, or landscapes, or groups of objects. Sherri had talent. Steve looked up to tell her so and found her staring at him expectantly.

“You’re good,” he said earnestly.

She laughed softly. “You sound surprised.”

He blushed. “I’m not surprised you’re good,” he said, “I’m surprised at how good.”

“Thanks.” She looked at him for a moment, and a strange expression flitted over her face.

“What?” he asked, suddenly apprehensive.

“Nothing. I just wanted to ask if I could draw you.”

“Sure,” he answered, blushing a little, “if I can draw you, too. I wish I’d brought my sketchpad. I’m nowhere near as good as you are.”

Silently, Sherri handed him a spiral pad and a couple of pencils. He set to work, trying to ignore the way she’d looked at him and concentrate on what he was doing. It had almost seemed as if she were sizing him up in some way. Her face had gone hard and the charm he’d seen there earlier had evaporated. But now it was back, as she studied his face and drew some quick lines on the paper.

They stayed silent for a while, each absorbed in the task. Finally, Sherri laid her pad facedown on the table and took two steps to the kitchen. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said.

Steve finished his drawing and laid his pencil down, but he kept the book in his lap and glanced curiously between the head-and-shoulders picture he had drawn and Sherri standing with her back to him, head bent, measuring coffee grounds into a pot.

There was something about her...had he captured it? The sadness, the loneliness in her eyes?

As if she’d heard his thoughts, she turned and smiled at him. The kettle whistled, and she turned back to the coffee.

She sat next to him on the couch and they drank their coffee, comparing the drawings they’d made. Her sketch made him look dull and expressionless, and even a little brutal, unlike her other portraits, which had been charming and full of life. Glancing at her, he noticed that she looked unhappy as she contemplated his sketch of her, and he wondered if he had failed to capture her character as badly as she had his.

“Do I really look like that?” she asked. Her tone was more forlorn than flirtatious.

“You’re beautiful,” he said simply, startled into the truth by her tone.

She met his eyes squarely for a second. Reaching towards him, she took his cup and saucer and set it down gently on the table.

Then she was on him, straddling his lap, as her skirt hiked up and his hands naturally dropped to the warm, smooth skin of her thighs. He jerked away as if branded, as she tipped him backwards, pressing her lips to his.

It felt good to be kissed. He gasped involuntarily, and it encouraged her, so that their mouths opened against each other, and he let himself enjoy it, willing his body to respond. He craved the human contact, the warmth of her in his arms, but the arousal he knew he ought to feel didn’t follow. Though she ground up against him, he was only half hard. He wasn’t going to be able to do this. He broke the kiss.

“We can’t,” he murmured.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, “just relax and let me do this.” She slithered down his chest and started to undo his pants.

“No,” he said again, taking her hands into his, “please don’t. We can’t do this. We only just met.” He hadn’t expected her to be so aggressive. He’d thought he would be able to control the situation.

“Just let me,” she insisted breathlessly, “please.” Her face was flushed, her voice edged with something like fear. He pushed her gently away, but she struggled, shoving his hands back with manic persistence. She looked wild, possessed, determined to do this thing that he didn’t even want. Steve’s arousal faded completely. This felt so wrong. He had to stop it. Lifting her with both hands, he moved her off him and sat her gently on the coffee table. The cups and saucers rattled as her body pushed them back. One cup clattered to the parquet floor. Surprised by his strength, she was suddenly still.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered hoarsely. Her cheeks were flushed and damp, and a few strands of hair clung to them. She smoothed her hair back with both hands as if suddenly aware of her appearance. “You weren’t... I could feel that you didn’t want me. I’m sorry.” She started to rise.

“Wait,” he said, laying a hand on one of hers, “tell me what’s wrong. Why were you so set on doing that?” A terrible suspicion was forming in his mind.

“Your friend,” she choked, clearly distraught, “Mr. Stark, he promised me...if I...he said if I gave you a blow job he’d pay my tuition for the next three years.” Tears shone in her eyes.

A wave of cold shock ran through Steve’s chest, turning to anger as it went. He was almost too furious to speak, but it wasn’t this woman’s fault. He had hurt her unwittingly. He had to make this right. “Just at this moment, Tony’s not my friend,” he said grimly, “but I promise you he’ll pay your tuition and your rent, too, until you finish school.”

“What do I have to do?” she asked, cringing a little, her eyes apprehensive. “I can do anything you want.” It hurt to see that look in her eyes, as if he held power over her, as if she had to do what he wanted, no matter what. He hated the feeling it gave him.

“Nothing,” Steve said, feeling helpless, trying to sound reassuring. “You don’t understand, I don’t want you to do anything. This should never have happened.” He suddenly noticed the pin she was wearing on her shoulder. “Did Mr. Stark give you that?”

Without a word she handed it to him as if she couldn’t wait to get her hands off it. When he turned it over, the tiny camera was there, just as he had thought. He snapped it off and dropped it into his cold coffee, but when he tried to hand the rest of the pin back to her, she didn’t raise a hand to take it. He let it drop on the table.

“I’m not a waitress,” she said flatly, looking at her knees. “Oh, I was, to begin with, but I couldn’t pay the bills, so my friend told me about this way to make money really fast, and you only had to do it a couple of times a month.” She finally met his eyes. “I’m an escort,” she went on. “I go with men on dates, and sometimes I spend the night with them. I do whatever they want, and they pay me well. I wish you’d just let me—”

“No,” Steve said, a little more sharply than he’d meant to. “No,” he repeated, more gently, “that’s not at all necessary.”

“Just my luck that you didn’t think I was hot. It’s never happened to me before. I don’t know—”

“It’s not you,” Steve interrupted. “It’s me.” Sherri scoffed and turned her head away, so that Steve understood how patronizing his words had sounded. “I’m sorry. You were moving too fast,” he said awkwardly. “I wasn’t ready.”

Sherri looked at him with sudden comprehension, wide-eyed. “Oh, god. You’re gay. And your friends don’t know,” she said, laying a hand lightly on his arm. “I’m so sorry. I embarrassed you. I didn’t mean—”

Steve’s chest was tight. I’m not gay! he wanted to retort, but the words stuck in his throat. She was right. He knew it was true, had always been true, but having someone realize it and actually say the words chilled him to the bone. What if he never found the woman who could fix him? What if he couldn’t be fixed?

He stood and started to step away from her, towards the door. “Listen, I’m going to leave now, but believe me when I say that I’ll make Mr. Stark keep his promise to you. You’ll never have to see me or him again.”

“I can’t accept his money,” Sherri said, shaking her head stubbornly. “I haven’t done anything for it.”

Steve picked up her sketchpad, which had fallen on the carpet. “Sure you have. I’ll take this picture you drew of me.” He tore the page off the pad. “Someday, when you’re famous, this will be worth a lot of money.” Steve felt his feeble attempt at a joke drop into the silence between them.

Their eyes met. Sherri smiled at him, a wan, forced smile. Steve made himself smile back. She rose and handed him his jacket at arm’s length.

“Thank you,” she said, but she looked more angry than grateful.

He backed up to the door and stopped. “Please,” he said, “don’t do that...work anymore. You’re talented. Believe in yourself. You’re going to make it.”

As he shut the door behind him and headed for the stairs, he heard her locking the chains and deadbolts quickly behind him, shutting him out of her life and her mind.

When he reached Stark Tower, it was still early, the indigo sky of summer just deepening into black. Taking the elevator to the top floor, Steve walked straight into the lounge. There they all sat—Tony, Bruce, Clint, and even Natasha—where, minutes before, they had been listening to, and watching, the unraveling of Steve’s nightmarish date. Everyone else remained seated, but Tony rose to meet him, waiting for it wordlessly, and Steve had to give him credit—he knew he deserved the punch that sent him flying backwards against the leather sofa, where he remained, feeling his jaw, as Steve turned his back on all of them and took the stairs down to his room.


	3. Chapter 3

Weeks passed, during which Steve and Tony hardly spoke. When work required them to interact, they managed a few stiff words. Steve realized that he had to defuse the tension somehow, or they would never be able to work as a team again.

At random times of the day, he would ask Jarvis where Tony was and who he was with. It seemed that Tony was never alone, until one mid-afternoon when Steve asked again.

“Mr. Stark is in the Arsenal,” Jarvis answered, “and, in case you were about to ask, sir, he is quite alone.”

Steve felt embarrassed. That almost sounded like curiosity. Was it possible that Jarvis was wondering why he wanted to catch Tony alone? Could a machine have such thoughts? “Yes, I have something to talk to him about.”

“Yes, sir,” Jarvis said innocuously. “I shall inform Mr. Stark that you are on your way.”

Shaking his head at his own paranoia, Steve headed for the one elevator that descended to the Tower’s lower levels.

The Arsenal. The Tower’s sub-basement, where Tony kept his suits, and where the Iron Legion was stored. He hadn’t introduced it to the world yet, so few had seen it. Steve hadn’t. He was curious.

The elevator door opened on a dim corridor that opened on one end. The only light came from somewhere beyond that passage. Steve stepped out, and the elevator slid closed behind him. A golden figure stood by the doorway as if at attention. It was a suit, one of Tony’s early ones, by the look of it, its lines stolid and crude, showing its origins—it had apparently been handmade by Tony and his much-maligned cyber assistant Dum-E.

Steve stood for a moment, watching it, wondering if Tony were actually inside, waiting to jump out at him. But the thing stood so still, that he soon decided it couldn’t be true. Besides, the old suits were difficult to put on. Tony couldn’t have taken it apart and reassembled it in the few minutes he’d known Steve was on his way.

Ignoring the creepy feeling in his gut, the hair standing on end at the nape of his neck, Steve started for the doorway towards the light. Just as he drew even with the figure, it reached out and grabbed him by the wrist. The metal hand clicked closed around his arm like a shackle. Nothing had moved but its arm, which bent at the elbow and now held him fast. He struggled, but he couldn’t move it. And in trying, he realized that the thing must be resisting him—otherwise, Steve would have been able to overturn it, or at least throw it off its feet.

“Tony?” he said loudly, hoping his emotion didn’t show in his voice. “What’s the big idea?”

The thing’s grip grew stronger, and Steve remembered, with a surge of adrenaline, that it was entirely capable of breaking his bones. With his free right hand, he punched it hard in the chest where he knew its controller must be. And, just then, Tony appeared in the doorway. He clicked a switch in his hand and the automaton let go of Steve’s arm and subsided back into inactivity.

“Hey, you dented it,” Tony said resentfully, running his fingers over the golden metal, which now showed the clear imprint of Steve’s knuckles.

“It grabbed me and wouldn’t let go,” Steve said reasonably. He didn’t want to argue about this. They were already at odds, and he hadn’t yet brought up anything important.

“It’s my watchdog,” Tony said proudly, patting it on the shoulder. “It just stands here and stops intruders.”

“Didn’t Jarvis tell you I was coming?” Steve asked, still irritated.

Tony shrugged. “Yeah, but this guy isn’t on the network. I have to program it directly, or with this.” He held up the remote control in his hand. “It was one of my first efforts. Want to see the Iron Legion? Compared to them, this guy is a dinosaur.”

Trying to let go of his anger and exasperation, Steve followed Tony down the hallway into a vast, open cavern whose high walls were pocked with niches. In each one a sleek metal figure stood, ready to be activated.

“Wow,” Steve said, honestly in awe. “I had no idea.”

“Watch this,” Tony said, smirking. “Right face!” he called out. The metal troops faced right. “Left face!”

Tony put the troops through a series of maneuvers that reminded Steve a bit of a sci-fi game of Simon Says. The whole thing honestly gave him the creeps. Tony had built himself a lot of power. What would happen if it were wrested from him?

He realized belatedly that Tony was waiting with an expectant air for the praise he thought he deserved.

“Impressive,” Steve said, trying not to let his doubt show in his voice.

Tony looked moody now. He could tell that Steve’s heart wasn’t in the compliment. “So, before I show you the best part, which you obviously can’t wait to see, what did you want to talk to me about?” Steve opened his mouth to speak, but Tony interrupted him. “It’s not that stripper thing, is it? Because, okay, I went a little overboard there, and you punched me in the face, so we’re even, right?”

Steve was stunned. “Stripper?” he echoed. “She wasn’t a stripper, she was an art student.”

Tony scoffed. “Really? Is that what she told you?”

“It’s the truth,” Steve said. “She showed me her work. She was talented.”

Tony laughed suggestively. “I’m sure she was.”

Steve shook his head. “She was doing sex work for the money. But art is what’s important to her. You’ll pay her tuition, right?”

“Yeah,” Tony spat, really annoyed now, “yeah, I said I would.” He started walking towards a small doorway on the far side of the enormous cavern. “Come on. You need to see this.”

Inside there was only one niche, covered with clear plastic, and inside was one metal figure, larger than the others. Its gold metal gleamed, and its broad shoulders gave it a menacing look reinforced by its blank red eyes. Tony stopped before it and indicated it to Steve with one hand. “This guy is going to solve all our problems.” 

“He is?” Steve asked blankly. “How?”

“His name is Ultron. You saw the army in there—well, here’s the commander-in-chief.”

“You’re the commander-in-chief,” Steve said, confused.

Tony shrugged. “For the moment. But when Ultron’s ready, he’s going to take over.”

“But you’ll still control him.”

“No. He’ll make his own decisions, that’s the beauty of it. He’ll protect us against invaders from space, like Loki and the Chitauri, and he’ll protect us from ourselves. And, best of all, he’ll patrol the whole earth. He can be in places we’d never reach in time. Can you guess how?” He waited expectantly.

“Through the network?” Steve said, as the horror of this creation dawned over his mind. “You can’t be serious, Tony. It’s a machine. It needs a human being to control it, to make decisions for it. This isn’t right.”

“You’re an old fogey, you know that?” Tony said angrily. He held up his hand to cut off Steve’s reply. “Don’t worry about it yet, old man. I’m having trouble getting his cybermatrix right. It’s much more complex than Jarvis’s, and it keeps collapsing. But, someday....”

But the name-calling had made Steve lose his temper. “Why do you always have to call me names and play nasty tricks? We’re supposed to be a team. How can we work together if we can’t trust each other?”

“Yeah, we’re a team, and this is what teams do. They kid around, they don’t take offense at a couple of little jokes.”

“These aren’t little jokes. They’re mean. They’re humiliating. Just think what you did to that poor girl. Trying to make her...to make her do... _that_ to me. It was embarrassing.”

“I did that for you,” Tony said with mock outrage. “You’re too shy to pick up any of the girls who hang around the Tower, so I thought I’d get things started for you. Come on, Steve, what man wouldn’t want a beautiful girl on her knees?”

“Maybe a man who doesn’t believe in prostitution? It wasn’t as if she was doing it of her own free will.” _Or a gay man,_ Steve thought silently.

Tony considered. “Yeah, okay, point taken. But it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done it before. And this was a really good deal. I’m putting her through school for god’s sake and she didn’t even go through with the blow job.”

Steve winced at the crude expression. “And you were all going to watch it through that little camera. What the hell, Tony?” Stark’s justifications were making Steve angry now. He had thought Tony would apologize so that they could put it behind them, but now he could see that it wasn’t going to happen.

“Buck up, Cap,” Tony said with exaggerated friendship, laying a heavy hand on Steve’s shoulder, though Steve could see anger gleaming in his eyes, “maybe you’re just too sensitive. You ever think of that?”

“Maybe you’re just a bully,” Steve snapped. Turning on his heel, he went straight to the elevator, leaving Tony standing there with his Frankenstein creation.

Steve was so furious he felt stifled by the Tower’s recycled air. In a few moments he found himself out on the plaza, standing outside the front doors with clenched fists and no idea where to go.

Tony didn’t know the half of it—that his nasty trick had made Steve face, once and for all, that he wasn’t turned on by women. He knew now that Peggy had been an exception. probably because he’d liked her so much, because he’d known that she liked him. He’d wanted so much to believe that the formula, which had changed so much about him, had changed that, too. But it hadn’t. Even if he and Peggy had been given the chance to settle down, to make a life together, he would still have had to face the truth about himself, sooner or later.

If Steve couldn’t tell Tony how he felt about the stupid pranks, how could he ever admit that he was gay? The jokes and tricks would redouble, and his life would become a complete misery. He needed to keep that secret forever, because, for the sake of the world, of this country that he loved, Steve had to remain Captain America, leader of the Avengers, no matter how difficult it became.


	4. Chapter 4

Long after Steve was sure he’d never see Loki again, Loki’s urbane voice woke him, drawling out his name. Steve sat up immediately, rubbing his eyes. With a shock, he realized that, thinking Loki would never return, he had slept in the nude. He moved to put his back against the wall, keeping the covers in his lap. Loki laughed at him and he blushed down to his shoulders. 

“I wonder that you’re ashamed of your body,” Loki said, looking Steve over with frank admiration. “You’re magnificent, you know.”

“You like men?” Steve asked, automatically defensive. Back in Flatbush in the 1920s and 30s, anyone who acted “that way” risked a beating or worse. Steve was still conditioned by that time to repel any advance, negate any suggestion that he might have such feelings, even if he did. And, in any case, he certainly didn’t want Loki.

“I like beauty,” Loki said simply.

Steve was ashamed. “Thank you,” he said, blushing harder. “I’m not used to being called...that.”

“Let me see,” Loki said, gesturing.

“See what?”

“The rest of you.” He smiled disarmingly.

Steve shook himself mentally. Loki was trying to put Steve off his guard with his talk of beauty, and he had partially succeeded. “As long as you’re here, can we talk about the Chitauri again?” Steve asked bluntly. He didn’t want to chat with Loki, or tell him things, and he certainly didn’t want to show Loki his body.

“If you wish,” Loki said graciously, but with a breath of sarcasm. “After all, I am a guest in your home.”

Steve snorted. “You weren’t invited, but now that you’re here, I can’t exactly offer you a beer.”

Loki smiled at him with apparent warmth for the first time. “I wish you could. We prisoners are not served the best ale Asgard has to offer. That is saved for the warriors’ banquets.”

Steve could see it: the warriors of Asgard lined up like the armies in those “Lord of the Rings” movies he’d seen recently. He wanted to know more about that place, Thor and Loki’s world—the amazing stories Loki must know!—but first he had to ask about the Chitauri. It was his duty to use this opportunity to find out as much as he could.

“You said you were coerced?” he asked encouragingly.

Loki shrugged. “I don’t generally make excuses,” he began. “No one ever believes me in Asgard anyway.” Steve refrained from pointing out the reason for that. “I know I have a reputation,” Loki went on confidingly. “But the leader of the Chitauri threatened me with death, should I not do his will. So I did it, but I refused to lead his armies, and so they lost.”

“Do you seriously expect me to believe that the whole invasion wasn’t your idea?” Steve scoffed and shook his head. “What about ‘You were made to be ruled,’ and ‘Freedom is life’s great lie’? You were just full of reasons to take away humanity’s freedom and make yourself king.”

Loki’s expression had stiffened as Steve spoke, as his eyes flashed with anger. “It’s true,” he said, smiling nastily, “but I only had your good in mind. Have you taken a good look at human history? War after war after war, genocide, slaughter, rape and pillage everywhere. Why do you think we Asgardians stopped visiting you? It was too much for civilized people to bear.”

“And you’d make us peaceful by being a tyrant?” Steve asked, outraged. “That battle killed hundreds of innocent people.”

Loki’s calm smile returned when he heard Steve’s voice rise. “At the first opportunity, I would have allied with you to drive the invaders out.”

“ _You_ were the invader,” Steve said with exasperation. “The Chitauri were _your_ army.”

All good humor left Loki’s face. “No, not _my_ army. Had they prevailed, their leader would have murdered me as soon as he had a chance.”

“Then why didn’t you turn against him? You could have told us, fought with us,” Steve said earnestly. “Maybe we could have won quicker and avoided so much death and damage. Instead, we had so little warning about the invasion that we couldn’t even evacuate anyone. We fought right there in the street with civilians screaming and running all around us.” Loki’s lies were so outrageous that Steve had nearly forgotten his resolution to pump him for information. Arguing with him was probably counterproductive, but talking about that day had brought back all its horror.

Loki laughed softly. “You know him not. He would eat you all alive, and myself as well.”

Steve got angry. “So we should do nothing? Just let him get away with it?” Loki seemed to have an answer for everything, an answer that justified what he had done.

“You have a highly developed sense of justice,” Loki said, with no detectable irony, “but that battle will only be won over many years of planning, with subtlety and stealth.”

“Still, why didn’t you tell Odin so he could start moving against him?”

“Odin is such a fool that he is less likely to act on something I tell him than on something he finds out himself. There are enough clues. Even he will arrive there eventually.” Loki spoke with contempt and hatred in his voice.

“Of course, you can justify everything,” Steve spat bitterly. “Why am I even talking to you? First it was this nameless leader’s fault, and now you’re blaming Odin.”

Loki looked searchingly at Steve’s face for a moment. “I’ve shocked you,” he said, “because I hate the man who adopted me as an infant, took me into his household, and raised me as his son. Yes, it’s true: I wish him dead.” His face took on such a look of malice that Steve had trouble continuing to meet his eyes. He wondered what tortures Loki had suffered at Odin’s hands. All he could think of to reply came from his own experience.

“My father died when I was a baby,” he said softly. “My mother died when I was fourteen. That’s too early to lose your parents. I fended for myself after that, with help from a friend. I don’t know what your parents did to you that made you feel this way, but surely they don’t deserve....”

Loki’s voice was so low, Steve had to strain to catch the words. “I had parents before Odin and Frigga, in Jotunheim. They abandoned me as an infant to die in a temple of ice. I have no idea what happened to my mother, but I killed my father.”

“You killed him? In cold blood?” Steve asked, shocked.

“I don’t know what difference that makes, but, no. He was about to murder Odin. I wish I’d let him do it before I killed him.” Loki looked at his hands, which were folded in his lap. “I have told you things tonight that I have never admitted to another living soul.” He looked up and met Steve’s eyes. “I’m not sure why. It must be the....” He trailed off. “I am always alone, save when Frigga visits, and she cannot come too often. And even then I cannot touch her.”

“I’m...sorry,” Steve said automatically. His head knew that Loki should be punished, but his heart was saying something else—something he wasn’t sure of yet. He tried to turn away from those feelings of sympathy. Loki didn’t deserve them. He was the sole architect of the Battle of New York, and now he was trying to manipulate Steve into doubting that indisputable fact. “But you did terrible things on this world.”

Loki’s face looked stricken. Steve was surprised—he had expected anger or an ironic smirk. “It is not just for my actions on Midgard that I am being punished,” he whispered. “I did something much, much worse.”

Steve’s chest went cold. Worse than the Chitauri War? “What did you do?” he asked quietly.

Loki shook his head as if he could not say it. “You did not tell Thor that we spoke. I am pleased.”

“I...I haven’t decided yet,” Steve said hesitantly.

“I must go,” Loki said, and disappeared. Steve couldn’t tell whether his last words had made Loki leave, or if something in Asgard had interrupted him. He sat for a few minutes thinking. He had to make a decision about talking to Thor. If anyone might be able to divine Loki’s motives in contacting Steve, perhaps it was his brother.

Something else kept returning to his thoughts: Loki had wanted to see him naked. That surprised him and made him uncomfortable. How could Loki so casually admit that he was turned on by men? Gods could get away with things that were difficult for mere humans. Steve would have to remember to wear pajamas to bed in the future.

***

It took Steve a few days to get Thor alone without making the others wonder what they were talking about. The Avengers fought together well, but in daily life, between Tony’s interference in everyone’s business, and all the practical jokes and teasing, there was a lack of trust that kept Steve feeling even more isolated than he already did. The others seemed to be able to handle this atmosphere, but Steve had been bullied too much in his youth to see the fun in it. None of them had known him when he weighed 118 soaking wet. They just didn’t get it.

Nominally, Steve led the Avengers, but he figured he wouldn’t be able to overrule Tony, Natasha, and Hawkeye’s violent reactions if they learned Loki was appearing in the tower. He understood—after all, Tony and Hawkeye had suffered at his hands. But he could see it from another perspective, too. If Loki was ready to talk about what had happened, to admit some responsibility, and maybe to divulge something about the real leader of the Chitauri, didn’t they owe it to Thor to give him a chance to speak?

He asked Thor first to keep a confidence, and Thor agreed, before laying out the story for him: when and how Loki had first appeared, what he had said, and what Steve had said in return. When he had done, Thor kept silent for a long time.

“What are you asking me to do?” Thor finally said, his face troubled. “I would not like to tell Odin, but if Loki is disturbing you....”

“No, he isn’t,” Steve said quickly. “It’s interesting, talking to him, and since he isn’t really in the room, I don’t see how he can do any harm.”

Thor laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Beware, my friend. Loki has a long reach, and the games he plays sometimes last for centuries. I would not wish you to be at his mercy one day because you spoke to him too freely now.”

“I don’t see that happening,” Steve said reasonably. “He can’t escape, right?”

“No,” Thor said heavily, “he cannot escape.”

“You miss him.” Steve had just realized it, looking at Thor’s face.

Thor nodded. “I miss the companion of my youth, my brother, my best friend and councilor.” He looked up and Steve saw the pain in his eyes. “But the criminal who twice tried to kill me, who set the Chitauri on New York and ravaged Jotunheim...I do not miss him.”

“If you feel that strongly about it—do you mind if I ask why you don’t want to tell your father?” Steve made a mental note about Jotunheim. That must be the “worse” deed that Loki had mentioned. But wasn’t that where Loki said he had been born?

“Nothing is ever simple,” Thor observed sadly. “My mother visits Loki, and she is perhaps his best hope of redemption, if hope he has. Perhaps it can also do him good to converse with an honorable man such as yourself. But Odin is hard. He does not want Loki to speak to anyone, to read, to do anything besides sit alone for thousands of years and become more entrenched in his rage and his madness.”

“Thor, tell me: did Loki lie to me? Was anything he said untrue?”

“What you told me was all true, as far as I know it, and that makes me wonder why.”

“Perhaps it feels good to him to tell the truth for a change.” 

Thor laughed. “Oh, my friend, you shall see. I say to you again, be careful. You know not with whom you speak. Loki can use the truth as underhandedly as he can a lie.”

“Why do you all see me as such an innocent?” Steve asked, annoyed.

“I intended no offense, my friend! But I have never met the man who could match wits with Loki and prevail.”

“What about Natasha?” Steve asked, wondering as he said it why he was so determined to prove Thor wrong.

“She seemed to best him. But perhaps at that moment Loki was not trying because he had a larger purpose.”

“So what he said about being coerced—”

“I believe it to be true,” Thor said moodily, “although why he would not tell me—that is a mystery I cannot hope to solve. We have recently heard from other realms that there was a leader behind Loki, someone vastly more powerful and beyond our reach, for the moment. His name was Thanos.”

This put a different light on things. If Loki had been coerced Steve wondered again why Loki had chosen to tell him rather than his father or brother. He knew that he shouldn’t be flattered by Loki’s interest, but he couldn’t help but remember that Loki had risked Frigga’s visits in order to talk to him. Maybe Loki needed to get some things off his chest, and maybe he wanted to say them to someone who would listen.

They spoke a few more minutes, and Thor cautioned Steve once again about letting Loki influence him. “Remember, he also killed Agent Coulson when he did not need to. He removed a living man’s eyeball and smiled as he did it.”

“Wasn’t he under the influence of this mysterious leader when he did those things?”

Thor shook his head. “Perhaps. But who controlled him when he sent the Destroyer to Puente Antigua? Or when he turned the Bifrost on Jotenheim? He told me Odin was dead and he turned the Destroyer on me because he wanted the throne of Asgard for himself. Loki’s jealousy and ambition are not to be underestimated. He has a devious mind, and if you show him weakness, he will find a way to betray you.”

“I’ll be careful,” Steve promised, already thinking of what to ask Loki next.

***

“Tell me about Jotunheim,” Steve began.

Loki looked thoughtful and wary. “If you are asking me about it, you must know something already,” he said carefully.

“You were born there,” Steve said.

“And?”

“You tried to destroy it, but I don’t know how or why.” 

“It is a land of monsters. I thought it would please Odin and Thor to see the end of them, so I turned the Bifrost against them.”

Loki was answering directly and in few words, without leading Steve off onto other topics. Steve wondered why. “But you’re from there—aren’t you?”

“I was raised in Asgard as a Æsir prince,” Loki said darkly. Steve felt that he was getting close to dangerous territory.

“Do Jotuns—”

“Jotnar,” Loki corrected him.

“Do Jotnar look the same as... Æsir?”

Loki laughed. “I know that Midgard is a backwater of the Nine Realms, but it is truly astonishing that you do not know these things. Odin lost an eye battling the Jotnar on Midgardian soil and then chasing them back to their frozen realm. Thousands of Æsir were killed. Your world would have been a Jotunn colony, but for his efforts. I might have been your king.”

Steve was tired of Loki’s arch ridicule, but didn’t want to antagonize him. “I still don’t know what they look like,” he said mildly.

Loki’s anger appeared to ramp up a notch. “The Jotnar are hairless blue giants. Their touch can freeze you. They are treacherous, misshapen, violent creatures—monstrous in their shape and in their evil hearts. They are the monsters that Æsir parents tell their children about. My parents told me such tales.” His eyes became unfocused, as if he were looking at something far away. “Knowing what they alone knew, they told me such tales,” he murmured.

Steve plowed on, “And, during that war, Odin found...you? But you don’t look like—”

Loki leaned forward, and Steve had to stop himself from recoiling in the face of so much fury.

“They abandoned me because I was not like them. Nor am I like the Æsir,” he said in a regal tone of bitter pride. “I am Loki. I am a world unto myself.”

Steve’s blood chilled as he heard those words. Loki’s pain truly seemed to have driven him mad.

“And that’s why you did it,” Steve said slowly, realizing the enormity of Loki’s crime, and of his desperation. He had attempted genocide against his own people because of his profound self-hatred. “So that’s why you’re in—” 

“Ask me nothing more!” Loki stood, sweeping one arm before him as if commanding Steve out of his sight. “Why should I not wish to destroy the land of my birth, where I was thrown away like garbage?” Loki’s voice was a low rasp, his eyes shining with fury. “Why should I be punished for this act, which was my just revenge?” He turned around so that Steve could no longer see his face. “Make sure that you amuse me better next time,” he growled softly, “or you shall not see me again.”

Steve did not go back to sleep quickly that night.

***

After that, Steve decided not to push Loki for information. It seemed as if Asgard was gathering the information they needed about this Thanos, the Chitauri’s leader. Steve could be of little use there. But he might be able to help in a completely different way.

Loki was a proud and dangerous man, an almost-god with a brilliant mind who wielded great power. The crimes he had committed were ample proof of that. What if Steve could connect with him somehow, what if he could become—if not Loki’s friend—at least someone who heard his pain? Steve knew a lot about abandonment. Rationally, he knew he couldn’t change Loki, couldn’t make him sane—but, in a little corner of Steve’s mind, he guarded that hope. He told himself how useful Loki could be to the Avengers. If Loki came to him again, he decided, he would apologize for driving him away.

***

“I’m sorry if I asked too many questions the last time,” Steve said disarmingly, meeting Loki’s eyes, but his very openness made Loki suspicious.

“You have no reason to apologize to me,” Loki said. “I cannot hurt you...at present.”

Steve shrugged, ignoring the implied threat. “People apologize to each other when they feel they’ve overstepped.”

Loki laughed. “So that they can forget the offense even though the other still feels its effects?”

Etiquette must be really different on Asgard. Maybe they had duels instead of apologizing. Maybe that explained some of Loki’s astonishing rudeness and the fact that Thor still seemed to be learning table manners as he went along. “One person apologizes and the other forgives,” Steve said, feeling a little silly to be explaining something so basic.

“Is that part of your American creed?” Loki jeered. “Truth, honor, patriotism, and neat little apologies to soothe hurt feelings?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Steve asked, starting to feel defensive.

“What isn’t wrong with it?” Loki laughed. “Do you think feelings are so easy to soothe, wrongs so easy to right?”

“Some things are hard to forgive, but if you don’t start with words, you’ll never forget.” Steve ignored Loki’s derisive chuckle and ploughed on. “What happened to you that you find so hard to forgive? Your abandonment as an infant?”

Loki ignored the question, but his face grew serious, his eyes intent. “Don’t tell me nothing unforgivable has ever happened to you. Tell me something that you haven’t forgiven. There must be something.”

“I’ll try,” Steve said, “if you tell me something you _have_ forgiven.”

They stared at each other for a second, at an impasse. Neither of them really wanted to continue with this, but both were too stubborn to say so.

Steve decided to use an example from his own life to show Loki the high road. “Before I took the serum, when I was a small guy, there were guys who beat me up just because it was easy, just because they wanted to humiliate someone. Forgiving that kind of cruelty is hard, but eventually I realized it wasn’t really even really about me, and so I’ve come to terms with it. Now, I think—”

“Have you forgiven me for New York?” Loki asked suddenly. His head was tilted back, his eyes half-closed, his face at once guarded and vulnerable.

Steve stared at him in horror. He sounded that place in his mind and found it still raw with grief and disgust and righteous anger. “No,” he said quietly. “No, I haven’t.”

Loki smiled a triumphant smile that showed too many teeth. “I’ve forgiven _you_ ,” he said, and disappeared.

Steve was struck dumb, his mind reeling. Was it a lie? A ploy to confuse him? Loki’s effrontery infuriated him. “What did _you_ have to forgive _me_ for?” he asked the empty room.

What had just happened? He and Loki came from different worlds. Did they even mean the same thing when they said “forgiveness”? How could they even hold a conversation if they shared so few reference points?

But Steve’s mother had taught him that there were two sides to every question. Suppose Loki’s mind had been controlled, and he had been forced to do the things he did—then everything that had happened to him since had been unjust. But that was by human standards. Maybe in Asgard, it was perfectly just and proper for Loki to be in prison, to be tortured, any way you looked at it, guilty or innocent—whether he had been mind-controlled, or acted out of fear, or whether he had done everything deliberately.

Loki had preferred to spend eternity in prison rather than tell Odin he had been coerced to lead the Chitauri. Maybe he was lying. Or maybe on Asgard intention didn’t make any difference—maybe it was the deed that mattered. Maybe it was worse to make excuses than to look like a cold-blooded murderer.

But Loki _was_ a cold-blooded murderer—wasn’t he?

Steve stood still and turned these new ideas over and around in his mind like a smooth river stone.

When Loki said, “I forgive you,” was he implying that he was innocent of the crimes he had been imprisoned for? Was Loki manipulating him, playing on his humanity, as Thor had warned? Or did he really feel that he needed to forgive the ones who had stopped his invasion of their world?

Steve shook his head in frustration. He wanted so badly to understand. How could Loki do the things he had done? _Why_ had he done them? Was he really to blame for all those deaths?

Steve asked himself why he was so eager to justify continuing to talk to Loki—had he been played on a deeper level than he realized?

He and Loki couldn’t touch each other; all they could do was talk. Steve knew that words could hurt you, but only if you acted on them, right? As long as he just _talked_ to Loki, asked him things about Asgard, for example, Steve didn’t see how he could really get into any trouble. As long as he kept his wits about him.

He could cut things off any time—he could always tell Thor to go to Odin and put an end to it. But he didn’t need to do that yet. Loki was fascinating. Steve could learn so much from him. He thought back to the science fiction he had read as a child: H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and the pulp magazines, _Amazing Stories_ and _Astounding Science Fiction_. He had always dreamed of getting a glimpse into another world, and this was his chance. Admittedly, he and Loki had reached a stalemate around the Chitauri War—better not to bring it up again for a while.

And, after that, strangely, though they never mentioned that conversation again, they spoke to each other with greater ease and openness.

 


	5. Chapter 5

It was noisy in the bar, noisy enough to bother Steve’s enhanced hearing. A guy at the bar was trying to pick up the woman next to him, who was obviously trying to get him to go away. A pair of newspaper reporters in a booth were discussing their paper’s editorial policy, while a group of plainclothes cops were toasting someone’s retirement. Steve could hear them all. And therefore the thing he should have been listening to—Tony telling an interminable story about the surgery that had removed the shrapnel from his chest—had become impossible to concentrate on.

Steve wasn’t there because he wanted to be. “Teambuilding,” Tony called it, so here he was in this noisy dive bar with Tony, Bruce, Clint, Natasha, Thor—wearing street clothes—and a couple of S.H.I.E.L.D. people, Maria, Nick Fury, and Agent Coulson, who had somehow come back to life since Loki had killed him, only no one would talk about how.

There weren’t talking shop, of course, because they were out in public, and because they’d been joined by a new guy Tony was trying to recruit, a guy named Sam Wilson who seemed pleasant enough, but apparently was not too eager to take up Tony’s invitation to join the Avengers. He’d been in the war in Afghanistan, but had left the military and retrained as a social worker. Now he counseled soldiers with PTSD. Steve found that admirable, but wasn’t sure what accounted for the career change, and he wasn’t sure what talent made Tony want to recruit him. Sam was letting Tony do most of the talking, laughing in the right places, but mostly keeping his opinions to himself.

The beer tasted bitter in Steve’s mouth. Bruce had called it India Pale Ale—something that guys like them, who didn’t get a buzz off alcohol anymore—could enjoy the taste of, at least, but Steve didn’t get it. It was unpleasant, almost choking him, and yet he didn’t feel like eating any more of the bowl of nuts and pretzels in the middle of the table, illuminated by the light fixture that cast all of their faces in shadow, with weird reflections on their skin, as if they were wearing Halloween masks. As usual, Steve felt completely out of things. Everyone else was smiling as Tony talked about the hospital nurses and the hell he had put them through in his days of recovery. Steve thought the things he’d pulled were mean, not funny.

Once again Steve was the odd man out, the one who saw things differently, the one who had nothing to add to the conversation. When the others occasionally tried to draw him in he got tongue-tied and stumbled over his words, and he could see the look in their eyes. The harder he tried, the more pathetic he felt. He had taken down Red Skull and hundreds of other Nazis. He’d held his own in the Chitauri War against incredible forces. But when he tried to have a conversation with Tony and the others, he still felt like that skinny kid from Brooklyn, trying to protest when the bullies beat him, or called him a retard and a fag.

The only time he seemed to be able to relax and enjoy a conversation was with Loki. Steve wondered why, and the only answers he had for himself weren’t very reassuring: because Loki was manipulating him somehow, and he was falling for it; because he felt so alien to this time and place that Loki’s tall tales appealed to him; because there was something wrong with him. That seemed to be the consensus among his colleagues—he was too sensitive, couldn’t take a joke, needed to grow up, or man up, or be something other than he was. Only Loki seemed genuinely interested in him, but maybe that was because he was the only thing coming between Loki and five thousand years of boredom.

Steve only half listened as Tony regaled them with a practical joke he’d played on one of the cardiac nurses that involved a full bedpan dumping out on the floor.

“That’s sick, man,” Sam said quietly, shaking his head with a little smile. “What the hell? Those ladies were trying to take care of you. They should have kicked your ass out of there.”

Everyone laughed, even Tony, and Steve thought about what would have happened if he had said something similar.

“You’re not helping your own case,” Sam added, laughing as he rose from the table. “I think you might be an asshole.” Everyone laughed again, although to Steve, it looked as if Sam meant what he said, despite his wry smile. “I have an early session tomorrow. Nice meeting you all. Thanks for the beer.”

“Well, how do you like that?” Tony said after Sam had left. “He drinks my beer and he calls me an asshole? I think I like this guy.”

“You came on a little strong,” Bruce said. “He probably thought you were asking him for a date.”

Clint guffawed, and Steve realized how the atmosphere at the table had changed after Sam’s departure. He hoped sometime he’d have the chance to get to know the man better.

***

Loki’s visits always seemed to be a few weeks apart, and they always seemed to occur between 2:00 and 5:00 in the morning. Steve had no idea what time zone Asgard was in, or if that question even made sense. He resigned himself to waking whenever Loki deigned to show himself, and to talking for as long as Loki stayed.

Talking to Loki was fascinating. He knew things about the universe, about time and history that Steve had never heard. Whether they were true or not, they were at least completely beyond Steve’s experience. And the few things he had looked up later—the ones he could find—had been mostly true.

Loki told him about Asgard, the Nine Realms, and the days when he and Thor wandered through the northern regions of Midgard and were worshipped as gods.

“Thor was the one who really had worshippers,” Loki said casually, but Steve could see the hardness in his eyes, “the women especially. They kept his altars neat and full of flowers and offerings. It was the size of his hammer, I suppose, and the thunder, that got their hopes up. I hope they weren’t disappointed when they actually got him into bed.” He grinned. “And Odin, of course—everyone was terrified of him because they knew he walked among them in disguise, so they knew they’d better keep performing his sacred rituals.”

“Didn’t you have worshippers?” Steve asked, wondering if he was being tactless.

“Just once.” Loki’s grin faded, though he looked pensive rather than angry. “It was in what you would call Iceland, the far north. A troll was devastating a village, eating their cattle and their children, and generally doing what trolls do. The villagers called to Thor, of course—no surprise there.”

“What did Thor do?” Steve pushed when Loki seemed reluctant to go on. “Did he kill it?”

“He tried. He flew right up there to the village, bringing me and another friend with him, as usual, so he could have witnesses to his prowess.” Loki seemed to have warmed up to the story now. He settled in his chair and leaned toward Steve. “When we arrived, we could see that the troll was carrying off a child—it had a small boy under one arm. So Thor went up to it—the thing was half again as tall as he was—and hit it on the head with Mjolnir.” He laughed, and Steve waited for the punch line. “Have you ever seen a troll?” Steve shook his head. “Trolls are primitive creatures that grow out of the rocks and moss of the earth. In fact, they look like piles of rocks, and they can conceal themselves that way. Just when you turn your back on them, they pull their parts together and chase after you. They’re all instinct—as far as I know, they don’t even use their heads for thinking. The blow from Mjolnir did nothing except make the troll angry, and it pounded Thor into the ground—with one arm!—and it didn’t even drop the boy.”

“Then what?” Steve asked, now completely engrossed in Loki’s words.

“Volstagg and I dragged Thor out of harm’s way, and Volstagg took a turn. He’s one of the Warriors Three, and he’s usually too lazy to go on any quest without a meal at the end of it. He eats so much that he was practically as big as the troll himself, so he decided to fight it, with his fists and his axe. That worked out well, as you might imagine.” By this time, seeing that Steve was hanging on his every word, Loki started actively enjoying himself.

“What did you do when your turn came?” Steve asked, fascinated by this glimpse into the mythological world where Loki had actually lived. He’d learned a little about Greek mythology in school, but he’d only half listened unless battles were involved. None of the stories he remembered had captured his imagination like this one.

“I laid a trap for it, of course,” Loki said with a smirk. “I told the villagers to empty out an old shed, where they used to smoke their herring, and put a sharpened iron stake in the middle of it, just inside the door. While they were doing that, I led the troll on a merry chase across the tundra. There was no place to hide up there, nothing besides piles of rocks and old snow from the previous winter. I had to fool it by shifting my shape: first I became a crow and flew around the troll’s head, teasing him. But the troll reached up and caught at my wing and pulled a feather out. Next, I became a wolf, and I sprinted across the plain with the troll in hot pursuit, but he ran so fast that he nearly caught me by the tail, and he pulled out a tuft of fur. So I became a dragon and breathed fire at him, but as I tried to double back around him to the village, he caught at one of my golden scales and pulled it off.”

“How did you get back to the village?” Steve asked, realizing that his questions were giving Loki the appreciation he needed to continue with the story.

“I became a swift horse and I galloped towards the village like the wind, leaping over stone fences and cairns as I went, with the troll at my heels.”

Steve had never been told a story like this. He was lost in the rhythm of Loki’s voice, in the contemplation of Loki’s face, in imagining these things: a troll made of a pile of rocks chasing a crow, a wolf, a dragon, a horse. Steve had recently realized that Loki’s looks—pale skin, dark hair and brilliant green eyes, his mobile face that expressed everything from child-like glee to diabolical fury—appealed to him as they never had before. He was surprised at himself, but he had started finding Loki beautiful.

“Finally, when I was nearly exhausted, I arrived back in the village. Just as we reached the smoking shed, I became a mouse and scurried under the door. Furious, the troll burst through the door and impaled himself on the iron stake.”

“What would the iron stake do to a pile of rocks?”

“Ah, you see, a troll is a magical creature. Iron is fatal to magic, more so if it has certain runes written on it.”

“So you carved runes on the stake?”

“Of course. But that wouldn’t hold the troll forever. First I pulled the child out of the rocks and gave him to his parents. He was bruised, but alive and squalling heartily. Then I took the rocks that had formed the troll’s head and buried them in different places all over the tundra. With the rest, Thor and Volstagg had a throwing contest. Some of the first rocks they threw into the North Sea, but once they got warmed up, they threw even further. The villagers used to say that one of those rocks had left the Earth and gone so far it had hit the moon.” He smiled, but there was something uneasy about it, a glimpse of malice behind the demeanor of the cheerful storyteller. “Thor can’t really throw that far, but there’s no limit to what grateful people will say about him."

“They were grateful to Thor?” Steve asked, puzzled. “But you were the one who led the Troll on a chase and set up the iron stake, and....” Loki stopped him with a wave of his hand.

“People are _always_ grateful to Thor. They remember the hammer and the blond giant who wields it. They want their daughters to marry him, or at least to bear his children. Spells are not as dramatic or obvious as hitting things with a hammer. People don’t trust magic. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“So, when I asked if you ever had worshippers...?”

“I did. The boy’s family set up an altar to me, and they kept it for several generations. The rest of the village fell into Thor worship.” He paused moodily. “And then, of course, it came out later that the boy’s father had lost a wager with a terrible giant—he’d wagered his own boy against some stake of riches or other. So I saved the boy, and the giant came after me for interfering in the bet, and for killing his troll.”

“Did you have to fight the giant, too?” Steve asked, wondering how large this story was going to get.

“Oh, yes, it was a big ugly brute of a thing, and it wouldn’t leave me alone, so we ended up killing it,” Loki said, laughing. “I said a spell to set its hair on fire, and when it bent low to douse the flames in the North Sea, Thor and Volstagg chopped its head off.” He paused, his laughter fading. “Guess who got all the credit for that?” he added.

Steve thought for a moment. “Is that story really true?” he asked suspiciously. “What if I ask Thor about it?”

Loki shrugged. “Look it up. There’s a version of it still hanging on in which I ask the troll to go fishing in a boat with me, and I conceal the boy in the roe of a flounder.” He shook his head sadly. “How stupid would I have to be to do that? These stories do get corrupted over a few hundred years.”

“Can you really change your shape? Is that true?”

Loki laughed and raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think? Why don’t you ask Thor?”

He was gone. And suddenly an enormous gray wolf was sitting there with slavering jaws, staring at Steve with piercing green eyes. Steve heard an echo of Loki’s laughter as it disappeared.

***

“Bucky used to fight my battles for me,” Steve said. “I hated it, even though he saved me from some major ass-kickings. I wanted to win one fight myself, just one. And, you know, every time I got into a bad spot I thought I had a chance, and I wouldn’t quit until I was flattened. It was stupid.”

“It was brave,” Loki said, “to strive when you knew you could not prevail. And also stupid.” He grinned. “When we were young, Thor was always at my side, and sometimes when he wasn’t, things went badly for me, until I found my powers.”

“Is Thor still not allowed to visit you?”

Loki’s face gave Steve his answer. “Where is your Bucky now?” he countered.

“He died in Germany, in the war. I couldn’t save him. He fell right in front of me, down into a chasm. They never found his body.” Steve couldn’t keep the emotion out of his voice.

“You were lovers, I presume?” Loki asked with a touch more sympathy than he usually exhibited, which was usually very little. “You must have mourned.”

Steve stared, taken aback, not quite knowing how to respond. “No,” he said, “we weren’t lovers, just friends. Why did you ask?”

Loki looked surprised, a rare thing. “You wanted him. It’s obvious in the way you speak of him.”

“I—” Steve suddenly found he was choking on unshed tears. “I mourned him. I still mourn him.”

“Why did you not couple with him?” Loki asked curiously. “Did he have another?”

“Why did you not ‘couple’ with Thor?” Steve asked sharply. “Bucky was like a brother to me.”

“Oh, but I did.”

“You—what?”

“Thor and I coupled as often and as vigorously as possible,” Loki said, laughing, “until he decided he preferred women.”

“You’re brothers,” Steve said icily. What Loki had said shocked him profoundly. “Isn’t there a rule against incest in Asgard?”

“It’s frowned upon to take these things too far into adulthood,” Loki said flippantly, “but we were young men—just a few centuries old. We didn’t flaunt it in Odin’s face, but I’m sure he knew.”

“And, after Thor?” Steve heard himself asking, trying not to blush.

“There has been no one worthy of note since Thor, but until I was confined here I took lovers from time to time, men and women both.” He paused and scrutinized Steve for a moment through half-closed eyes. “You are virgin, are you not?”

Steve wished he could disappear as Loki often did to end a conversation. He decided that any answer he could make wouldn’t tell Loki anything he didn’t already know.

“There is no shame in it,” Loki said, as kindly as he ever said anything. “If I could touch you, I’d show you the ways of love and remove this doubt from your mind.”

“Uh, thanks. I think,” Steve said, feeling about as inept and embarrassed as it was possible to feel.

“Or,” Loki said speculatively, “you could remove your clothing and I could talk you through it, though it wouldn’t really be the same.”

Steve declined as politely as he could.

***

Steve thought over that conversation many times in the weeks before Loki’s next visit. What Loki had said about Bucky brought up deep feelings that he had never really acknowledged. He knew how much he had admired Bucky, and how grateful and yet exasperated he’d been when Bucky tried to stick up for him, to fight his battles. There had been a combination of affection and condescension in Bucky’s attitude towards him. If only they could have had more time when they finally met as equals. What might have happened then?

And soon he had to admit that he had been half in love with Bucky. Now he dared to add thoughts about Bucky to his fantasy life. But what would Bucky have thought about these fantasies? And what would he have thought if he knew that sometimes Steve touched himself when he had these thoughts?

Thinking of Bucky had brought back a fantasy that Steve indulged in rarely, a dark and shameful fiction that had brought him great pleasure. It would always start in an alley, with a gang of toughs. Steve ran from them, knowing he couldn’t fight them all, and yet the running itself, and the thought of being caught, made him hard, as fighting often did. And then he was cornered, trapped between brick walls, battling madly against impossible odds, until one of the toughs came forward, sneering, and said, “I’m going to rape you.” Steve figured that in real life rapists didn’t always announce their intentions, but somehow imagining the words made the shameful pleasure even more intense. The man would slice off his clothing with a knife, hold him down, and take him there, on the street, with all the others watching. And now the man had Bucky’s face.

***

Friday nights at Stark Tower were dedicated to beer and conversation—another team-building exercise that Tony insisted on. They’d had a rough week because an American entrepreneur had found a cache of Chitauri technology—some bits from a downed drone that had fallen into the subfloor of a Manhattan building—and sold it to a group of terrorists. The Avengers, with air support from S.H.I.E.L.D., had attacked the terrorists’ underground base in the New Mexican desert before they could use the technology they had found, or connect it to their computer network, or sell it to Hydra, which had probably been their intent.

Now the recovered tech sat on the floor in the middle of the Stark Tower lounge, as a half-dozen tired people knocked back beers and looked at it.

“I wish we knew what it did,” Hawkeye said into the silence. “I mean, we don’t even know if it’s dangerous, or what it’s good for.”

“We couldn’t let them have it,” Natasha said tiredly without looking at him.

“I’m not suggesting we should,” Hawkeye replied, “but if we knew what it did, maybe we could use it.”

“Bad idea.” Sam Wilson had joined them for this assignment, and Steve finally knew what his talent was: he drove an EXO-7 Falcon jetpack—the only one left, as far as anyone knew. “The Chitauri communicated through a network. If you hooked it up to a computer they’d probably be able to hack us in a second.”

“I thought the soldier that carried this technology was dead,” Thor said, puzzled.

“It is.” Tony came back from the kitchen with a new six-pack, which clinked when he dropped it on the table. “But Sam’s right. It could reactivate as soon as it was hooked up to an active computer system. It would have to be done under controlled circumstances. In fact....”

Steve’s mind wandered as the talk grew more speculative and technical. And, lately, when his mind wandered, it usually wandered to Loki.

Because of the New Mexico raid and the ensuing cleanup, Steve hadn’t been at the Tower in nearly a week. He wondered if Loki had come, and, if so, whether he would come again, or if he would stay away for a while out of wounded pride. This had happened before when Steve was on assignment. Right now, Steve missed Loki badly, and, tired as he was, still hoped to see him tonight.

Steve often thought about how openly Loki and he had spoken to each other over the past year. Loki had started by showing up once every two or three weeks; now it was several times a week. He had no one else to talk to besides Frigga and Steve; Steve had no one to talk to besides Loki. And, truly, he didn’t mind his alienation from the other Avengers so much anymore. The thing he minded was that there was so much distance between him and Loki. When he thought about how dependent he had become on their conversations, he scared himself. But he rationalized it by remembering that they could never touch, could never really meet. This was the only way they could ever have been friends.

Steve knew Loki deserved punishment for what he had done, but surely he also deserved human contact, the chance to tell his side of things, even if it would make no difference in his fate. This sympathy, and the distance between them, the fragility of their connection, made Steve prone to revealing himself more fully than he ever thought to. No one else in the world now knew him as well as Loki.

“You’re crazy,” Sam said sharply, breaking into Steve’s reverie. His beer bottle rapped smartly on the table as he rose from the sofa. Steve suddenly realized how tense the room had become, how focused everyone was on Sam and Tony. Steve had missed their entire conversation.

“It needs to be isolated,” Tony said reasonably. “I could use an encrypted firewall, or I could even hook it up to an isolated machine with an air gap. The possibilities—”

“How do you know it couldn’t communicate with the mother ship anyway?” Sam insisted hotly. “If you do anything besides grind this thing into powder, you’re—”

“Because I blew up the mother ship with an A-bomb,” Tony said sharply. “Because the Chitauri are all dead.”

Sam shook his head angrily. “You bring shit down on yourself, you know that?” He looked around at the tired group in the lounge: Steve, Tony, Hawkeye, Natasha, Bruce. “Not one of you agrees with me?” Steve had a feeling he would have, but he had missed most of what they were talking about.

He decided to find out what he could. “Tony, are you thinking about trying to use that thing? Do you even know what it does?”

Tony turned on him. “Where the hell is your head these days? I just want to find out if it’s a brain or a hip joint. I need to reactivate it under controlled conditions, and then I’ll be able to—”

“Don’t call me when it blows up in your face,” Sam said furiously, stalking towards the elevator.

There were a few moments of silence. “Tony,” Bruce said quietly, “he’s probably right. It’s too risky. We should destroy it.”

“If we don’t destroy it, S.H.I.E.L.D. will want it,” Hawkeye said reasonably, “and god only knows what they’ll do with it.”

“Fine,” Tony said moodily. “Leave it there. I’ll destroy it in the morning.”

“You sure you don’t want me to—” Bruce began tentatively.

“I’ll do it,” Tony snapped. Wrenching another beer off the six-pack, he left the room.

The gathering broke up soon after, and Steve was free to go and wait for Loki.

***

“Peggy was incredible,” Steve said, “and she was the one who reminded me of what I really wanted to do, why I joined up in the first place.” He was sitting on the floor with his back against the bed as Loki sat cross-legged just before him and listened, his head cocked to one side. “If I hadn’t gone into the ice, we would have gone on a date a few days later. But she knew I wasn’t coming back. She kissed me good-bye.”

Loki considered. “And if you hadn’t gone into the ice, the Red Skull would have used the Tesseract to rule the Earth. Do you ever regret giving up your happiness to save your world?”

Steve nodded guiltily. He hadn’t expected Loki to understand. In his lap he held a sketchpad on which he had drawn a likeness of Peggy wearing her uniform. Strange that he remembered her features so clearly that he could draw them from memory without looking at a photograph. “Here she is. She’s over 100 years old now. I go to visit her from time to time, but she knows who I am less and less often. It’s sad.”

“You’re free,” Loki said. “And you’re young. Why don’t you find someone else and continue your life?”

“I think about that sometimes,” Steve said. “I guess I’m not ready yet. You know, the 70 years I was in the ice—they went by in an instant. When I woke up I thought I’d been out a day, maybe a couple of days. I thought I’d still be in time for our date. For me, it’s only been a couple of years since the serum, since leaving Peggy, since Bucky died, and I’m dealing with that, and with a whole new world that I’m not sure I completely understand yet.”

“Does anyone ever completely understand their whole world?” Loki asked speculatively. “You just have to live, not think so much about it.”

“What about you?” Steve asked. “Is there anyone you...?”

For once Loki chose to understand Steve when he trailed off a sentence instead of pretending not to and embarrassing him. “Odin allows me no visitors, not even Frigga or Thor, although Frigga’s _seidr_ allows her to appear to me despite his wishes. Normally I would be permitted a consort, but Odin has denied me that too, because he wishes my line to end with me.”

“Who would you take for a consort?” Steve asked hesitantly. “If you could, I mean?”

Loki shrugged noncommittally. “None would have me. Lest you forget, I am a great criminal,” he said, using both arms to make a grandiloquent gesture. “By Odin’s order, when I went to my sentencing, I was chained, hand and foot, with a heavy iron collar, and a dozen guards surrounding me, holding my leads as if I were a bull led to slaughter. I had passed a year in the dungeons, believing I was about to die, and when they led me before the All-Father, I defied him. Thanks to Frigga, I was ‘merely’ sentenced to pass my life in this place. She didn’t know how cruel she would be by being tenderhearted.”

Steve wanted to say that if Loki had been executed, they would never have met—but could he really measure thousands of years of imprisonment against their acquaintance, or friendship, or whatever it was? Instead, he said, “Why did they make you wear so many chains?”

“To make me feel my powerlessness; to humiliate me beyond hope of redemption. The runes on the chains blocked my _seidr_. And so one thin chain with the proper runes would have sufficed.” Loki leaned forward, remembering, his long hair spreading around his shoulders as he looked down at his folded hands.

Steve suddenly wished he could brush back that hair from Loki’s face, and touch his cheek, and kiss him. He was starting to have sexual feelings for Loki—surely it could be no more than that?—and it surprised him, because Loki in a dungeon in Asgard was as unreachable as Peggy or Bucky. It was a fantasy, that was all, brought on by the way Loki’s eyes roved over his body sometimes—hungrily, and with a touch of malice that made Steve shiver when he happened to catch Loki looking.

With a jolt, Steve realized that Loki was looking at him strangely. Since Loki’s last words Steve had been thinking of how much he wished he could touch his friend—yes, after all this time, his friend—instead of answering Loki’s words. He hoped his face hadn’t revealed what he was thinking.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said awkwardly. “But I’m glad they didn’t execute you.”

Loki laughed silently. “I’m not sure I’m glad.” His smile faded as he shook his head. “I have perhaps said too much for this night,” he added, and disappeared.

For the first time, Steve felt bereft to see Loki vanish so abruptly. And so his mind created a new fantasy, one that—he convinced himself—was as harmless as the others. It would start with him talking to Loki, when suddenly Loki would walk through into his reality, grab him, throw him on the bed, and take him without a word of excuse or explanation. He imagined Loki’s strong fingers around his wrists, Loki’s lips and teeth on his lips, his chest, Loki’s cock inside him, though he had no idea how that felt. But, like the fantasy about Bucky, it was hot enough to spin him off into pleasure, and vile enough to cover him in shame when he was done.

***

“How fares my brother?” Thor asked one day when he found himself alone in a room with Steve. “Do you still speak with him?”

“Yes, we speak,” Steve admitted, thinking as he said it that they probably spoke all too often. “He’s lonely, I think. But he seems...more open now. I think we might be friends.”

Thor looked concerned. “I am glad he cannot reach you,” he said simply.

Steve flushed with anger. “Why is that? You still think I can’t hold my own?”

“Against Loki? No,” Thor said soberly. “Few can. His wits and his magic make him formidable. If he hadn’t been playing a dangerous game against Thanos, and if the Hulk hadn’t caught him unawares, we might not have vanquished him at all. He would simply have disappeared when the fighting was over.”

“I see,” Steve said, realizing that, aside from the fact of mentally projecting his image over millions of miles of space, and once turning into a wolf, Loki had not made a point of displaying his magic.

“When we were back in Asgard, just before things went wrong, Loki was becoming more and more violent,” Thor confided. “I blame myself for not doing anything about it.”

“What did he do?” Steve asked, shaken.

“He forced sex on unwilling partners,” Thor said sadly, “and used cruel and vicious ways even with those who were willing. Even the lowest prostitutes had begun to flee from him. They could not complain of this openly because he was a prince.”

“You think he would...be violent with me?” Steve asked, his mouth dry. “He can’t get to me.”

“No,” Thor agreed. “But I wonder what he is thinking.”

Now Steve’s private fantasies about Loki redoubled, so that he often walked around in a daze of sexual obsession and longing. The weird thing was that he knew he didn’t really want to be raped; it was the _idea_ of rape that turned him on, the thought of someone wanting him enough to force him. Tony asked more than once what was bothering him. Steve had no good answer.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains, among other things, a "mythological" story with some raunchy sex. Just in case that is not your thing.

Steve awoke with roaring in his ears, as if he had fallen asleep by the ocean and awakened in a tempest. Opening his eyes he saw a vast hall, filled with more people than he had ever seen in one place in his life. Even Madison Square Garden, where he had seen the circus as a child, couldn’t match the enormous size of this great arena, where every person crammed into its space was cheering at full volume. And every single one of them seemed to be looking toward him, Steve, sitting on the dais wearing striped pajamas.

At the back of the theater, he saw movement. A single figure was advancing towards him, and the crowd parted around him like a sea. At first Steve thought it was Thor because the red-caped figure was holding up a hammer that looked like Mjolnir, but it soon became clear that the man had black hair that swayed around his shoulders as he advanced slowly through the room. It was Loki.

Steve stood, straining to see better. Loki was shaking Mjolnir triumphantly in his right hand, and, as he came slowly forward, he turned from side to side to acknowledge the wild adulation that people were expressing on all sides.

Loki reached the steps and mounted towards Steve, stopping just before him.

“What is this?” Steve asked weakly. “What are you doing?”

“I have been crowned king of Asgard,” Loki said haughtily. “I’m giving the people what they want.” He turned to take a deep bow, sweeping the long red cape behind him. It was edged in fur; its clasps were gold encrusted with multicolored jewels.

“Where are we?”

Loki laughed. The self-important, kingly look had left his face. “Turn around,” he said. “Look where you’re sitting.”

Steve turned and realized that he had risen from his bed, which was still in his room in Stark Tower. When he reached for Loki his hand passed straight through. The roar of the crowd subsided, their faces fading into darkness.

“It’s an illusion,” Steve said, bewildered, “but why? Why show me this?”

Loki shrugged. “I have to remind myself sometimes how things are supposed to be.”

Steve just stared. “What are you talking about?”

“I am the rightful king of Asgard,” Loki said stiffly, “and one day I will take my place on the throne. You’ll see.”

How deluded was Loki, if he thought he would ever ascend to the throne? Steve opened his mouth to tell him, but, with one more swing of his hammer, Loki disappeared.

***

“When we were very young, Thor liked to gamble. He liked it more than he should have, and he never knew when to stop.”

By now Steve recognized Loki’s tone when he was going to tell a story. He settled in, listening avidly, wondering exactly how “young” Thor and Loki had been at the time, but not liking to interrupt to ask.

“Odin sent us to the kingdom of Thrymr, a giant whose name means ‘great noise,’ and indeed he loved to boast and brag and bellow.” Loki laughed, as if at a private joke, and Steve unconsciously moved closer, dying to know the joke. “Of course, Thor loves to do those same things, so they got along famously.”

“A giant?” Steve asked, wishing it were true and yet convinced that Loki was exaggerating.

“That’s what they called him. He stood two heads taller than Thor and was broader and stronger in every way.” Loki cocked his head at Steve and looked at him quizzically. “Does this interest you? Shall I go on?”

“Yes, please,” Steve said, trying not to show how wrapped up in the tale he was already.

“Thrymr’s table was known for its abundance, if not for its finesse. We were invited to dinner, which started with stuffed quail—a dainty morsel for Thrymr, who could eat a dozen at a time!—and ended with roasted sides of beef that the courtiers tore apart right there on the table, fighting over the fat and the right to chew on the leg bones.” Loki shook his head. “Even in Asgard, such barbaric displays would not have been tolerated. I shudder to think how many animals were slaughtered for that one meal.

“Thor kept up with the courtiers in drinking, if not in the amount of meat he consumed, so, by the time the gambling table was set up, he was roaring drunk. I tried to drag him off to our chamber, but he would have none of it. And so, when the cards finally turned against him, as they were wont to do, he suddenly found that he had lost his most precious possession.”

Loki paused, and Steve knew he was waiting for encouragement. “Mjolnir?” he asked.

“Yes, Mjolnir.”

“Did you have to steal it back?” Loki never minded if Steve anticipated the story, as long as he was wrong.

Loki shook his head. “That was impossible. The king’s rooms were closely guarded, and we were watched, as well. The giants turned out not to be as stupid as they appeared. In fact,” Loki added, “as we learned later, Thrymr had probably planned to win Mjolnir from the beginning.”

“Why do you say that?” Steve asked.

“Because, the next day, when Thor offered to buy the hammer back with gold, Thrymr said he would only take one thing in trade for it.”

“What?” Steve sat forward, hanging on every one of Loki’s words.

“Thor’s distant cousin Freyja, a beautiful Vanir maiden.”

“So what did you do?”

“We agreed.” Loki said flippantly, as if there were no other possible reply.

Steve frowned and opened his mouth. “But—”

“And we left the very next day to bring her back to Thrymr.”

“Loki, how could you do that unless she consented?” Steve started to worry about how this story was going to come out.

Loki chuckled. “Of course she did not consent,” he said. “She knew nothing about it.”

“What?”

“And yet, a few days later, Thymr welcomed a veiled lady and her maidservant into his court.”

Steve got it. “You and Thor, dressed as women?”

“Very good, yes. Giants don’t have the most acute eyesight, and, besides, they are often drunk.”

“What was the plan?” Steve asked eagerly.

“The false Freyja asked Thrymr for Mjolnir as a wedding present. Rather, her maidservant asked, for I did most of the talking. I could never trust Thor not to drown himself in liquor and say something stupid in those days.” He laughed softly. “On the other hand, that often made him more malleable to my plans.”

“And did Thrymr give it to him…her?”

“Not right away He wasn’t as stupid as that. He said he would give it to her as a pledge of marriage, as soon as he had taken her.” He shook his head and grinned. “Fairly stupid, all the same.”

Steve’s head whirled. “How could you arrange that? Did you find a women to impersonate Freyja?”

“No, my innocent friend. I told you that Thor pretended to be Freyja. Thor had lost Mjolnir through carelessness, and it was only right that he take the consequences.”

“But how…Oh.” A picture jumped into Steve’s head that made him give up his naive question, a picture that went straight to the darker side of his imagination. “Did Thor agree to that?” he asked casually, hoping Loki wouldn’t notice what the thought of Thor submitting to Thrymr did to him, even while he was appalled at the idea that Thor might not have consented.

“He had to, if he wanted his beloved Mjolnir back. And it wasn’t as if he was a virgin—I had made sure of that.” Loki grinned. “But he had never been taken by a giant before.

“So, in Thrymr’s darkened chamber, his blushing bride, all swaddled in veils, knelt on the bed and presented her ass for Thrymr’s use, since she was too afraid to become pregnant before she was properly married, or so her maidservant said.”

Steve had no more questions. He had to keep reminding himself to breathe. Like Thor in the story, he was happy that his own room was dark, so that Loki could not see his furious blush, or the uncomfortable bulge in his loose pajamas. He pulled the sheet up further into his lap.

“So, after being properly prepared by the maidservant and a very drunken Thrymr, Thor’s ass was stretched open by the biggest cock he (or I, for that matter) had ever seen, or will likely ever see. It was hard work, and it left us all panting, most of all Thor, but we got it all the way in.

“When Thrymr started to move, Thor started cursing. The curses were all meant for me, of course, but Thrymr thought they were for him. ‘My, my, this virgin lady curses like a sailor!’ Thrymr exclaimed. ‘That is because she has never been taken before,’ I answered. ‘Perhaps you should push in deeper and ride her slower, just until she has the way of it.’”

Steve had never in his life read anything pornographic besides a few tame girly magazines during the war that hadn’t really turned him on. He’d never heard anything like this, ever, and it was making him so high he was afraid he might groan or squirm and give himself away.

“So Thrymr did as I suggested, while I took Thor’s cock into my hand, and soon he had forgotten his cursing and was making real sounds of arousal, which pleased the giant king no end.”

“Eventually, of course, the giant found his release, and so did Thor, who was so angry he wanted to throttle me, which would have kept me from reminding Thrymr of his promise of a wedding gift.”

“Did Thor get Mjolnir back that night?” Steve asked, clearing his throat a little and making a concerted effort to keep still with his hands folded in his lap.

“Before Thrymr fell into a sated stupor, I convinced him to call a servant to bring the coffer that held Mjolnir to the bed chamber. As soon as Thor got it into his hands, he wanted to kill everyone in the castle to keep them from telling the story, but I convinced him not to.”

“Why? Because there were so many of them?”

“No, it would have been an entertaining battle, especially with Thor in the throes of wounded pride. I reminded him that everyone thought that Thrymr had taken Freyja. For all they knew, Freyja—or perhaps some woman pretending to be Freyja—had let herself be fucked to get Mjolnir for Thor, and then had slipped away in the night before the marriage. If anyone’s reputation was tarnished, it was Freyja’s.”

“Why did you want Freyja’s reputation to be tarnished?” Steve asked, just for the sake of asking something, not even sure the question made sense. His mind was reeling with what he had just heard. In their youth, Thor and Loki had adventures like this one, while Steve spent his own youth being gay-baited and beaten up in Flatbush.

“That’s very astute of you,” Loki replied slowly. “Many years ago, I stole her amber necklace for a fire casting, and she set Heimdahl on me. I’d waited a long time to have my revenge, and, since I’d talked Thor into sparing lives, I couldn’t really be blamed, could I? How could I have foreseen that consequence?” He smirked, and his green eyes glowed with a feral light.

Steve was in a fever of desire. He was simultaneously turned on by the story and disgusted by Loki’s machinations. “That’s…quite a story,” he said lamely.

“What?” Loki asked haughtily, annoyed by his apparent lack of enthusiasm. “You didn’t like it?”

Steve hesitated, but finally decided to say at least part of what was in his mind. “It wasn’t very nice…what you did to Thor. Or Freyja.”

Loki shrugged. “Thor and I did worse things to each other in those days. In fact, he had his revenge the very next day when we returned to Asgard.”

“What did he do to you?” Steve asked naively.

“What do you _think_ he did?” Loki’s laughter rang out in the room as he disappeared.

Grabbing a handful of tissues off the bedside table, Steve stroked himself twice and came violently. He fell into a deep sleep disturbed by dreams of giants and veiled maidens who all turned out to have Loki’s face.

***

Loki knew he thought of Steve Rogers far too often. He was becoming obsessed with the ridiculous young mortal with the perfect body. Steve was like a young Thor without the entitlement and selfishness that had—all too briefly—brought Thor down. If Loki could only have taken him—defiled him and set him aside as he had done with so many others, it would be over now. But Loki had precious few options, and talking with Steve was making him vulnerable to softer feelings he hadn’t felt in quite some time.

One night, Loki thought of Steve and pushed his mind across the universe, although he knew it was earlier in New York than when he usually traveled there. He appeared and, when he saw what Steve was doing, immediately concealed his image in an invisible glamour, approaching softy so that he could not be seen or heard.

Steve was lying naked on his bed, his eyes closed, spread out and relaxed as Loki had never seen him. One hand was on his sex, stroking it, the other cradling his balls. He murmured softly and moaned as he tightened his muscles, straining towards release. Loki put his hands there, wishing to take hold of him, but he was insubstantial, a ghost of himself. Steve felt nothing of his touch.

How lovely he was, this human, pleasuring himself with no thought of how wanton he looked, with all of his soul turned inward to whatever thoughts fed this rapture. For a brief instant Loki let himself imagine that he was the object of Steve’s desire, that, behind those fluttering eyelids, he was mastering Steve’s perfect body, sucking or fucking him, or being fucked, tasting the breath from those lips. But it couldn’t be. Steve must be dreaming of beautiful Peggy, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent he had loved—the woman he had let slip through his fingers after one kiss—or of Bucky, the friend who had not wanted him. They would both remain perfect forever because untasted, as Loki would crave Steve for many nights to come because he could not take that flushed cock between his hands or kiss those parted lips.

Steve’s breath came faster now, and he cried out softly as he spent over his own belly. The expression on his face—vulnerable, exposed—was the most staggering thing Loki had ever seen. Biting off a cry of anguish, Loki wrenched his mind back to his cell, engulfing himself in a glamour, undressing with a gesture, yanking at himself so hard it hurt, as he pictured Steve in his arms: reaching the peak of his pleasure, crying out Loki’s name. Loki wanted to be the one who had taken Steve to those heights, holding him as he keened in the back of his throat, stammered out words of love that Loki had never yet heard in his life.

Loki’s pleasure, when it came, was halfway to pain. For a long time he knelt behind the glamour, his body heaving with misery, both hands buried in his hair, as he mourned all the many things that, now, could never be. Never again in his life would he lay hands on a warm, living body; never again would he give and take pleasure. He was finished. He had nothing left but anger, and regret, and a longing great enough to swallow the ocean.

Loki resolved never to visit Steve again.

***

A week went by, and then another, without a visit from Loki.

Steve’s first impulse was to worry—that Loki was ill, that something had happened to him, that he had escaped his prison, but surely Thor would have told him if any of those things had occurred?

As more time passed, Steve turned Loki’s absence into self-reproach—perhaps Loki had lost interest because, after all, Steve wasn’t really that interesting. And, finally, after more than a month, he began to question Loki’s motives: maybe it had amused Loki to make Steve care about him, and now he was pulling back to see what would happen; he’d been seeking a way into the Avengers and it hadn’t panned out; he’d been playing a game, and it no longer interested him.

Losing contact with Loki didn’t bring him back in touch with the Avengers. If anything, it disconnected him further. When he was alone in his room, he felt his isolation more than ever, and so he turned more often to his fantasies. Afterwards, he felt pathetic. Why couldn’t he date and have friends like normal people? He knew his line of work would keep him from having a large number of friends, and that was fine, but why not one or two flesh-and-blood friends, instead of the ghostly image of an old enemy projected from a universe away, who didn’t even show up anymore?

For two weeks, a series of assignments took Steve away from the Tower, changing his routine enough to almost make him forget his loss. But Loki always lurked at the back of his mind—a question that never seemed to have an answer.

***

Months after Loki’s last visit, Steve was half asleep when he heard a moan and a labored breath. Heart pounding, he snapped on the lamp. Loki was there, lying on the floor, his hair a tangled mess, his face bleeding from scratches that looked self-inflicted. His bare feet were bloody, as if he had danced on broken glass. Sparks of green fire danced around him, giving his face an eerie jade cast.

“Loki,” Steve cried, dropping to his knees. His first crazy instinct was to urge him onto the bed, to bind up those wounds, but his hands went right through Loki’s flesh, and with a shock he remembered where Loki was. “What happened?”

“The Queen is dead, Frigga is dead, and I could do nothing to stop it. Perhaps it is even my fault.”

“How could that be? You’re in your cell, you haven’t—”

Steve wasn’t even sure Loki knew where he was, wasn’t sure Loki could hear him. The image blanked out and immediately returned.

“Asgard is invaded. The Dark Elves have breached the citadel with their ship. They freed the prisoners—but not me, of course, not me. They must have known who I was. And I tried to misguide them, but they found a way to her, to her tower, and they killed her.” Loki tried to take Steve’s shoulders in his hands, and that was the first time Steve knew Loki saw him. “With my last words I denied her, said she was not my mother, and now...”

Steve said the first thing that came into his head. “She knew,” he said. “She must have known how much you loved her.”

Instead of lashing out, Loki seemed to quiet. “I hope she took some of her enemies with her. I hope.... But there is no hope—she is dead,” he said dully, and he then screamed, shrieking with such raw grief that Steve scrabbled back on the floor away from him, and then he was gone.

Steve stood, shaking with horror, knowing he had to tell someone.

A pounding came at his door, and when he opened it, Tony stood there in shorts and a t-shirt, his hair disheveled.

“Jarvis said someone screamed in here. He could hear it out in the hall. Are you okay?”

“When was the last time you heard from Thor?” Steve asked tightly, dreading what was to come.

“Thor? A week, maybe. Why?”

“Something is very wrong in Asgard,” Steve said. “Have Jarvis wake everyone. I have something to tell you.”

***

The night Steve told the Avengers that Loki had been visiting him in the tower for a year was not his finest hour.

The way they looked at him made him know that—no matter how isolated he had felt before—it was about to get worse. He reminded them how they had treated him when he had first tried to tell them that he’d seen Loki, to no avail. They saw his silence—and his long, secret association with Loki—as the worst kind of betrayal of everything the Avengers stood for.

Worse yet, of course, there was nothing they could do about what was happening in Asgard. They tried to contact Jane and were told she was supposed to be in England but had disappeared. A week went by, during which they worried and talked in circles, and then the Convergence began. Early news reports indicated that Thor was on the scene. By the time they had pulled themselves together to go help him, it was over, and Thor was back, telling them what had happened—that Jane was safe, and Odin had given him permission to remain on Midgard. Oh, yes, and one more thing…

Loki was dead.

Steve often thought about the moment he heard those words. Thor said them almost apologetically, his eyes sad, as if he were begging his friends not to erupt in cheers.

“He died a hero,” Thor said, his voice a bit hoarse. “He fought against the Svartalfar like ten men, wielding his dagger in every direction, so fast you could barely see him, mowing them down when they thought they had him surrounded. And he protected Jane.” Thor’s eyes softened when he said her name. “But when he approached the Kursed to kill it with its own weapon, the monster stabbed him through his body. I held him in my arms as he died.”

There was silence in the room as everyone wondered what to say. Steve spoke first. “I’m sorry, Thor,” he choked, hearing the catch in his own voice.

“He redeemed himself,” Thor said. “I will miss him. But he died a good death.”

“Won’t you see him again?” Tony asked. “Doesn’t he go to Valhalla, or something?”

There was a silence, during which it sank in that Tony had made a faux pas. Maybe a good death didn’t make up for a lifetime of tricks and betrayals.

“Perhaps,” Thor said vaguely, “perhaps I will.” He turned to Steve and laid a hand on his shoulder. I am sorry for you also, Captain,” he said. “I know he was your friend.”

That had clinched it. No one told Steve anything anymore. He was called out when they had a Doombot attack or some other crisis, and then he directed their tactical forces. But from then on he was only peripherally involved in the social life of the tower.

More than once, Steve found himself alone in the Tower on a slow weekend when no global crises threatened. At first he thought that everyone had scattered in different directions, until one Saturday night when he took a walk down Broadway and happened to spot the whole team in a bar and grill down by 42nd Street. Through the window he could see them as if in pantomime: Nat, animated, told a story, while Tony continuously interrupted her. Bruce, Clint, Maria, and Thor—even Thor was there!—laughed and drank and pounded on the table with enthusiasm.

Steve could have walked in and joined them as if by chance—but he knew his exclusion had been deliberate. Instead, he went to a burger joint and ate alone, silently, and when he returned to the Tower and found that the others weren’t back yet, he went to his room.


	7. Chapter 7

As the next couple of years went by, the team’s anger subsided, and Steve felt less like a pariah. The others were friendlier, but they never started playing tricks on him again. He almost missed it. Almost.

A cluster of Hydra cells had surfaced around the globe, so the team was continuously busy tracking them down and flushing them out of their hiding places, some of which dated back to the Second World War.

Steve and Thor talked sometimes when the others weren’t there. One of them would say that something had reminded him of Loki and they would share a quiet moment, missing him. Steve’s sexual fantasies subsided to a reasonable frequency, but they never went away. The groupies continued to haunt Stark Plaza, waiting for a glimpse of him. He tried to see them as Tony saw them—as opportunities for fun—but he just couldn’t do it. For him, they were more likely to be opportunities for embarrassment.

He missed Loki more than he thought he would, and longer. They had formed a connection, strangely enough, born of mutual loneliness and pain. Steve thought maybe they had been good for each other.

***

After refusing all that time, Steve finally went to the shrink recommended by Banner. Phillip was a nice young man, tall and thin with heavy glasses over his brown eyes and hair that curled around his earlobes. Upon entering the pleasant room, decorated in soothing greens and browns, Steve had had no idea how he would broach the subject that was bothering him, but they got to it quickly enough.

“I’m gay,” Steve finally said after fifteen minutes of awkward starts and stops. “It’s taken me a long time to accept it, but it’s true.” It was the first time he had said those words aloud.

Phil nodded. “Okay. Does that have anything to do with why you’ve come to see me today?”

“A bit,” Steve said, blushing. Would everyone in his life accept it this quickly, without drama or judgment? “The colors in this room…they remind me of a friend of mine who died. He always wore those colors,” he added.

Phillips asked about this “friend,” but Steve wasn’t going to admit who he was, at least not yet. He was mourning the guy who had attacked the earth with the Chitauri legions. That didn’t seem to matter any more. Of course it mattered. But not to Steve.

“He used to visit me randomly, in the middle of the night. He’d wake me up, and we’d talk.”

“Why didn’t he come during the day?” Phillip asked, reasonably enough.

“He couldn’t.” Steve didn’t want to get into it. “But here’s the thing—I fell in love with him. I still fantasize about him.”

“That seems reasonable enough,” Phillips remarked. “How long ago did he die?”

“Just over two years. But the thing is—those fantasies—they were—”

“Yes? You can tell me.”

In my fantasies I wanted—want—him to rape me,” Steve said miserably. “Not that I _really_ did.”

“Did he ever try anything with you? Jump you, hurt you?” Steve shook his head no. “Did you ever kiss, or anything else?”

“He looked at me,” Steve said, knowing he couldn’t explain why Loki hadn’t touched him. “I’m pretty sure he wanted me.” Just saying that sent a shock of arousal through Steve’s cock. It hardened, as he sat there hoping it couldn’t be seen.

“Rape fantasies are pretty common,” Phillip said, sitting back in his chair and stretching out his long legs under his desk. “Where we get into trouble is when people really want to be raped, but it doesn’t sound as if you do.” 

“No, not really.” Steve had to say it twice to get his voice under control. “Why do I have these thoughts, though?” he asked. “Why would that seem hot to me, when there are so many other…”

“Right,” Phillip said, smiling a little. “That’s the big question. Depending on your background…well, for example, if you were bullied, you might feel that being attacked was a comfortable place. Not comfortable, exactly,” he said at Steve’s protest, “but familiar. An unsafe place of safety.”

“I don’t understand,” Steve said grimly, but he was starting to.

“These perversions are called ‘paraphilias.’ They’re very hard to get rid of.”

“Perversions?” Steve asked, as pinpricks of sweat broke out on his face.

“Don’t worry, they’re only called perversions because they’re outside of the usual way people find gratification in sexual acts. You’re not thinking about hurting anyone. Just make sure you don’t let anyone hurt you.”

Steve thought for a moment. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“You can try not to have the fantasies. Think of something else. Just think of having sex with your friend—mutual sex, with no power issues. Or think of someone else who turns you on. But don’t beat yourself up it if doesn’t work out. If something happens to you when you’re young, you can get imprinted by it. You might have these thoughts for the rest of your life. And that’s okay.”

“It doesn’t feel okay,” Steve said uncomfortably.

“What about this—are you having those thoughts as a way of abdicating responsibility for the sexual feelings?”

Steve’s heart beat a little faster. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“Maybe you feel guilty for having these sexual thoughts. If you were forced, it wouldn’t be your fault.” Phillip watched him for a moment. “I might be wrong. Think about it and see if it fits.” 

“Yeah. Okay,” Steve said. It sounded crazy, but maybe it did fit. What kind of a nut did that make him?

Steve wished he’d had a chance to try having sex with Loki. He’d always felt uncomfortable when Loki had looked at him that way, and when he’d made those remarks about Steve’s beauty. But maybe he’d felt uncomfortable because Loki got it about him. Maybe Loki had known what he wanted—something short of rape that fed his fantasies. And maybe Loki could have given it to him.

“What about being gay?” he asked hesitantly. “There was a woman I cared about once, but I...I lost her, and I keep thinking, if I found the right woman again, I could....” Steve trailed off hopelessly. “It’s not going to happen, is it?” he said finally.

Phillip shook his head. “Don’t ask me. You’re the only one who knows what turns you on. Sexual orientation is hard-wired in your brain, too. Remember all those churches that tried to ‘cure’ gay men? It didn’t work, and it never can work. It’s more like torture than a cure, because being gay isn’t a disease.” He paused for a moment. “I get the feeling that you’re not entirely convinced of that.”

Steve met his eyes. “I’ve always been gay, and I guess I’ve always known it. But I kept hoping I was bi. Maybe then I could be with a woman, but women just don’t...I mean, when I kiss a woman it doesn’t feel....”

“It doesn’t turn you on?” Steve nodded. “But men do?”

“Yeah.” Steve’s voice was a harsh whisper.

“Then you have your answer.”

Steve paid Phillip and left, and he never went back.

***

Nearly three years after Loki’s death, Steve realized it was time to take Loki’s long-ago advice and get on with his life. 

Steve lived at Stark Tower and hardly spent any money, but he had a full bank account. When he had come back from the ice, Nick Fury had insisted, over Steve’s objections that it wasn’t necessary, on paying him for time served as if he had still been a soldier, including those 70 years. Now that he was on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s payroll, his pay just kept accumulating in the account. The only thing he’d ever bought with it was his custom Harley and a few clothes. When Tony found out that Steve was thinking of donating the rest of the money to charity, he put his foot down.

“You need something that belongs to you,” he said. “A place to go sometimes. You can’t always be Captain America. Give part of it to charity if that turns you on, but get yourself a place.” Tony laid a friendly hand on Steve’s shoulder for the first time in ages. After years of absence, Pepper had finally come back to Tony a few months before, saying that she would give him one final chance. It seemed that Tony took her ultimatum seriously, because he had cut down on his drinking and changed his behavior. Now that he had something to be happy about in his own life, he had started leaving people alone to live theirs. Steve realized he had missed Tony’s friendship, ambivalent as it sometimes seemed, and that made him more disposed to take Tony’s advice.

“What will you do if I kick you out?” Tony went on. “You can’t live on the street.”

Steve laughed wryly. As usual, Tony’s friendly overture was accompanied by a barb. “Are you trying to tell me something, Tony?” he asked.

“Nah, not yet, as long as you pull your weight around here. But, come on, as long as you live in the Tower, you can’t have a private life. Get a place—somewhere you can bring a girl.”

Steve spoke almost without thinking. “It’s more likely to be a boy than a girl.” There was a moment of silence between them as Tony’s eyebrows rose. “I guess it’s about time I told you that,” Steve added, wondering what Tony would say. It felt good to have the words out there, but Steve was still embarrassed. He didn’t like sharing information about his private life.

“I never saw _that_ coming,” Tony said after a few seconds, shaking his head. “See? You just proved my point. You need your privacy. I bet you haven’t wanted to bring anyone home because you were still in the closet, am I right?”

“Yeah.” Steve nodded, trying not to blush. As usual, Tony relished talking about anything having to do with sex.

“Well, come on out, Cap,” he said jovially, giving Steve’s shoulder a squeeze. “And I have a real estate agent I want you to meet.”

Somehow Steve avoided having to meet Tony’s real estate agent. He wanted to do this himself, taking his time and deciding what he wanted, without any pressure to buy something luxurious that wouldn’t suit him. He started looking at apartments in Manhattan, and then houses in Brooklyn and Queens, but quickly decided that he wanted something in the country, surrounded by trees. Without quite knowing why, he was drawn to the Adirondacks, to Lake George, where he and Bucky had once spent a week at some charity camp, slogging around in the forest, learning to canoe, and swimming in the cold waters of the lake. The camp hadn’t been all that great, with its buggy cabins and outhouses where it was too easy to get ambushed by a bully, but he’d thought at the time that the surroundings must be the most beautiful place on earth. He wanted to go back there and see.

One summer weekend, when things at the Tower seemed calmer than usual, he got on his Harley when the sun was just coming up and drove straight up the Thruway. The open road made him feel free, and he liked seeing the trees and mountains all around him.

It took about three hours to reach the southernmost tip of the lake. He stopped for a hamburger at a lakeside stand, and realized that it got pretty crowded around there in summer. Striking up a conversation with some locals, he learned about a smaller lake in a nearby wilderness area that had some old cabins, and one had just come up for sale. It was forbidden to build there now, but the old places had been grandfathered in. The place needed some work, but Steve loved its location—set on a rise, up a short, steep trail through the woods from the lake. By sunset, he was signing the papers.

The cabin dated from the early 40s, which made Steve take to it right away, but the insides had been completely renovated and insulated in the late 90s. Downstairs, there was one large room, including the kitchen, which was an alcove on one side. To the west, the windows were large, giving him a nice view of the lake, but the view from the porch wrapped around the west side of the house was even better. Upstairs, there were two bedrooms—a large master bedroom with a queen-sized bed and a guest room with a single bed, with a bathroom between them on the landing.

Steve realized that the place, simple as it was, actually was much less rustic that what he had initially visualized, but it was comfortable, and livable even in winter, and it was a place where he wouldn’t be ashamed to bring someone.

After the inspections, he bought the place as-is, because he wanted to make it his own. Once the sale was complete, he came up every few weeks to work on it. He put on a new roof and rebuilt the porch steps. He upgraded the potbellied stove and brought in a new refrigerator and stovetop, plus a microwave. He bought some second-hand furniture and kitchen utensils at a local swap meet, but Tony insisted on buying him a couple of expensive beds, perhaps his ham-handed but endearing way of showing that he didn’t have a problem with Steve’s sexual orientation.

The lake was called Yaponok, an Indian name, and Steve soon found that most of the people living in the scattered old cabins around it liked peace and quiet as much as he did. Sometimes on summer weekends, he heard the sound of a motorboat, but since there was no public boat launch, most people who were inclined to ride around in a motorized shell of fiberglass drinking beer stayed over at Lake George.

The gift of the beds was Tony’s excuse for inviting himself to come up and look around. He arrived in a chauffeured stretch limo that barely fit up the driveway, and he brought Pepper with him. They drank beer and ate reheated pizza on the porch and looked out at the lake, exclaiming over the view. At sunset the mosquitos were a problem for everyone except Steve, so Tony and Pepper ended up leaving soon after. 

“Great little love nest,” Tony said, as they walked towards the car in the waning light. “Who are you getting to come up here and share it with you?” Pepper elbowed him in the ribs. “Seriously, if you don’t have any use for it sometimes, Pepper and I would love to come up here and….”

Pepper stopped his mouth with her hand. “What Tony means to say, Steve, is ‘It’s a beautiful place, thanks for the beer, and we’ll see you back in the city.’” Steve got the impression that they both thought the place was nice, but pretty boring if you didn’t have a lover to share it with or somewhere else to go. Steve could see that point of view, but, at the moment, he was happy just to work hard and feel as if he’d accomplished something for himself, then sit on the porch and look into the distance until it got too dark to see.

He thought about Loki sometimes when the sky grew golden at dusk: what they had shared, what could have been. He still couldn’t believe that Loki was gone, that he would never again appear unexpectedly in the night and tell a fascinating story straight out of mythology, or make a remark that would start them on a long, satisfying argument. He seldom thought about his old sexual fantasies about Loki. Just remembering and wanting him opened up a well of loneliness and longing inside Steve that he would rather not sound the depths of. But, sometimes, he let it happen, because it brought back, along with the regret, a wisp of the presence he missed. Little by little, the regrets grew less sharp, and the sadness gave place to the good memories of time they had spent as friends, just as they had with Bucky.

Whenever he could, he went up to the cabin for a few days. In fall, he bought a cord of firewood and pairs of snowshoes and cross-country skis, hoping to find some time to spend there in winter, maybe with a friend.

After furbishing the cabin to his liking, he gave half of the rest of his accumulated pay to a foundation dedicated to helping the victims of the Chitauri War and their families. For once, Tony had nothing critical to say.

***

Now that Steve had told Tony—and thereby the other Avengers, since Tony couldn’t keep a secret to save his life—that he was attracted to men, he decided to act on it. His identity as Captain America in New York wasn’t generally known, so he decided to try a discreet online dating site. His goal was not to find a life partner right away, but to go on some dates with like-minded men, and eventually to find someone he could be friends with, someone who could help him get rid of his embarrassing virginity. After 105 years, it was about time.

The first few dates he went on didn’t go anywhere. He saw a movie with a man named Arthur, but when they went for coffee afterwards, it turned out they had nothing in common to talk about. His second date was similar, except that the guy, named Emile, couldn’t talk about anything but the religious cult he was trying to indoctrinate Steve into. With Chris, his third date, he talked about motorcycles through a couple of hours, and discovered that they did have some other tastes in common. After their second date, dinner and a walk along the shore in Brooklyn Heights, with the Manhattan skyline twinkling across the river, Chris invited Steve up to his apartment in Prospect Heights, in Brooklyn, not too far from where Steve grew up. He decided to accept.

It was an older building, the kind where every sound carries, and it was late, so they whispered to each other, trying not to laugh, as they took the elevator to the sixth floor, where Chris lived in a one-bedroom apartment that had a view all over Brooklyn. Steve remembered with a shock that this had been the old Bell Telephone building that was right in front of the church his mother used to take him to on Christmas for midnight mass. Memories came pouring back, but he couldn’t talk about them with this new friend without revealing too much about himself.

“What’s wrong?” Chris asked, noticing his change of mood. 

Steve decided to tell as much of the truth as he could. “My mother used to take me to midnight mass at St. Boniface sometimes. I hadn’t thought of it in years.”

Chris slipped an arm around Steve’s waist as he stood at the window. They were about the same height, so when Steve turned to him, their mouths came together naturally, and it felt so right that Steve started to tremble with anticipation. As he slid his arms around Chris’s back and kissed him harder, he felt the other man push against his chest. He broke the embrace.

“Hey, man, take it easy. That hurts. I couldn’t breathe.” It had hardly felt like anything to Steve. He had no inkling that he had pressed especially hard, but Chris was looking at him with something like fear, touching his lip and looking at his hand as if he expected to find a trace of blood there. What if Steve had lost control of himself and had hurt him really badly? This wasn’t going to work. 

“I’m so sorry,” he said, “I have to go.” He didn’t even wait for the elevator but walked down the five flights as swiftly and as quietly he could, and as soon as he got home he removed his profile from the dating site. All his hopes were dashed again. Maybe he was just fated to be lonely.


	8. Chapter 8

Almost four years to the day after the Convergence, Thor alerted Tony that Loki might still be alive. He hadn’t been seen, but Odin had been discovered, hidden in the dungeons, and _someone_ had been on the throne of Asgard, impersonating him. 

S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers went on high alert, scanning the skies and patrolling the area where the Chitauri had attacked. It seemed useless to Steve, when no one had any idea what was going on in Loki’s mind, or whether he had any thoughts of returning to a place where he had been vanquished. Why wouldn’t he just disappear? Tony thought that Loki would probably come back for revenge; Thor had agreed, and so, here they were, watching the streets around Stark Tower.

Steve rode around in a quinjet with Natasha for a while, and then he walked the streets, inadvertently attracting autograph hunters, adoring young women, and little children carrying red, white and blue shields, bought at the local Target. It was embarrassing and hopeless, but at least it gave him something to do while his mind obsessed endlessly over whether Loki could actually be alive, and, if so, how he felt about that.

What if they had to fight again? Could Steve switch back to being Loki’s enemy after everything they’d said to each other, after all his fantasies? What if Loki simply went off and was never heard from again? That would be the most prudent move, but, because Loki was involved, that didn’t mean it was the most likely scenario. On Thor’s face Steve saw most of what he was feeling: hope, anger, apprehension.

After dark, patrols from S.H.I.E.L.D. took over, and Steve returned to his room at the tower, discouraged and frustrated. He opened the door and turned on the lights. And then, as he had half expected to, he found Loki standing there. He was disheveled, his hair long and unkempt, and a manic light gleamed in his eyes. Deliberately, Steve hung his shield up on the wall and closed the door behind him. He pulled off his mask and dropped it on a chair. They looked at each other silently. Steve couldn’t read Loki’s expression.

“Loki,” Steve finally began. “It’s been four years. I thought you were dead.” Reproaches sprang to his lips, but he didn’t voice them. _I cared for you, how could you do that to me, why didn’t you tell me you were alive…._

Loki smirked shamelessly as if Steve’s words were exactly what he had been waiting for. “Did you mourn?” 

Trying to hide the sting of those words, Steve scoffed. “Of course I mourned,” he said stiffly. “We talked...we told each other things. I thought we were friends.” He couldn’t help going on as his anger mounted. “Where the hell were you? And what are you doing here? They’re looking for you everywhere. What didn’t you just disappear when you had the chance?”

Loki grinned triumphantly. “I fooled Thor. I fooled them all. I’ve been on the throne of Asgard. They never would have discovered the trick if they hadn’t found Odin, stashed in a cell, under a glamour, in plain sight. That’s why I came back, to tell you that. I _told_ you I would rule someday, and I did.”

Steve scoffed again and shook his head. “You left your father—”

“He’s not my father!” Loki’s eyes flashed angrily. He had been waiting for praise and he hadn’t gotten it. Realizing that made Steve’s ire rise.

“Okay, your _adoptive_ father—you left him in a dungeon for four years.” Steve could hear his own voice roughen with frustration. He was furious for the pain Loki had put him through, put Thor through, and for what? Steve could have understood if Loki had taken the opportunity to get away from his prison, but what he had actually done made no sense.

“He would have left me in a dungeon for thousands of years, thousands!”

“Then why didn’t you escape when you could?”

“And just disappear? No, I needed him to feel my power. I needed to prove that I could rule!” Loki stood stiffly, fists clenched at his sides. Steve despaired of reaching him, but still he tried.

“And now that you’ve ruled,” Steve asked flatly, “now what? Did you come back here for revenge?” He held out his empty hands, palms up. “I thought you and I had a connection.” He felt himself choking up, and shook it off angrily. “We were friends. Now I don’t even know why you’re here.” He intended to turn away and leave the room until he saw the raw shock on Loki’s face.

“I, your friend?” Loki asked, taken by surprise. “You lie.”

“I don’t lie,” Steve said heatedly, “and you know it. You know you made me care about you. And then you went off and did another stupid thing—” 

“Stupid? How dare you—”

“Yes, stupid!” Steve was flat out yelling now. “One of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of! Everyone thought you were dead. You were free. You could have gone off wherever you wanted. No one ever would have found you again. Or you could have come back for me. We could have—” The words were pouring out now, and Steve couldn’t stop them, even though he hadn’t meant to say this.

“And why would I want to do that?” Loki asked slowly, his eyes becoming fierce, focused, interested. 

“We could have been—we could have been—” Regret and embarrassment made Steve stutter incoherently on the words.

“Yes? We could have been...?” Loki’s eyes were blank, cold.

“Lovers!” Steve spat the word as if it were the worst imprecation. “We could have been lovers, but you had to rule Asgard.” The absurdity of what he was saying made him choke out a laugh that sliced his throat like a blade.

With an easy swagger, Loki closed the distance between them. Suddenly speechless, Steve was conscious of Loki’s scent, all leather and sex and wildness; he was overwhelmed by the sheer, forceful _presence_ of the man, which he hadn’t experienced since Stuttgart.

“Is that what you think?” Loki asked coolly. “That we could have been lovers?” He took Steve by the shoulders and shoved him hard, making him stumble backwards against the door. Before Steve could fall, Loki grabbed him by the uniform and yanked him to his feet. Steve felt the clench of arousal in his belly, felt his cock stiffen. Loki’s rough touch had turned him on. He was a sick man. He tried to push Loki away, but didn’t even succeed in making him step back.

“For years,” Loki was saying through gritted teeth, “I’ve wanted to profane you so that I didn’t have to think of you anymore. And now you’re trying to tell me that you care for me, that you want me?” Taking Steve by the arms, Loki dragged him to the bed and threw him on it, straddling his body and holding him down. “We’ll see how much you _want_ me,” he said derisively.

“You think you have to force me?” Steve said in a strangled voice, straining his wrists without success against Loki’s hands.

“I can do what I want.” Loki was imperious, disregarding Steve’s words.

Steve laughed, hearing an edge of hysteria in his own voice. “Yes, you’re stronger than I am. I can’t stop you from doing anything.”

“Then—?” Doubt crept into Loki’s green eyes, doubt and a molecule of apprehension.

“I _want_ you, you fool,” Steve said thickly. He was hard, deliriously aroused, subjected again to the old perversion that he’d tried so hard to destroy. “How can you not realize that?”

Suddenly, Loki was hauling him to his feet by the front of his uniform and stripping the clothes down off his shoulders, tearing the catches that held the cloth in place. Steve didn’t stop him. He felt a weakness in the pit of his stomach, but his body was tense as a bow.

His uniform was around his knees when Loki yanked down his briefs, letting his erection bob free. He wanted Loki to kiss him, to make love to him. But he didn’t think it was going to happen that way.

“It’s true,” Loki exclaimed, “you want me. We’ll fix that. You’ll learn— _this_ is what it means to want me.” Grabbing Steve’s undershirt with both hands, he ripped it from the hem straight up the center in one motion, pushing it off Steve’s arms. Taking Steve by the back of the neck and one arm, Loki mouthed and licked his neck and chest, biting at his nipples. Steve was breathing hard, but his arms were at his sides, balled into fists, as he responded to the pleasure and the pain of it. He wondered what Loki was going to do next, and he didn’t care. He knew he wanted it, whatever it was.

And when Loki looked up to judge his reaction, Steve took Loki’s face into both hands and kissed him, open-mouthed, playing his tongue against Loki’s, tasting him, and for a moment Loki responded. Then he pulled away, but Steve followed him, holding on as long as he could. 

“Who had you first?” Loki asked tightly. “Tell me who it was.”

“No one,” Steve whispered, “I thought it would be you. I wanted—”

Loki pulled back, holding Steve inches away from him. “You’ll never see me again,” he said, speaking softly into Steve’s face. “You need to forget me. I’m not coming back.”

“I can’t forget you,” Steve cried, reaching for him. “I tried, but I knew we could have been good together.” _God, he was pathetic. He sounded so needy, but he couldn’t let go without a fight, not again._

“You shouldn’t have waited,” Loki said harshly. “You shouldn’t have trusted me.” And he took Steve’s cock into his hand.

Steve’s knees became water, but Loki dragged him back to his feet by the scruff of his neck and slung an arm around his waist to hold him upright. Loki took his mouth again and stroked his cock slowly, the hand encircling it almost unbearably tight as his thumb toyed with the foreskin and slid unctuously over the slit. He was moving in slow motion, and Steve couldn’t tell him anything, couldn’t encourage him—because he didn’t want it this way—or fight him—because he couldn’t bring himself to stop it. He stood, kissing Loki back—hands gripping Loki’s shoulders now, tangled in his hair—moaning and waiting for Loki to do whatever he was going to do. Loki jerked him twice and Steve almost went down, and then twice more and he was coming in Loki’s hand, shuddering and gasping and trying to hold on to Loki by the arms, the hair, anywhere he could get a grip, but he couldn’t.

Loki swiped his hand once over Steve’s chest, leaving a swath of semen there, and shoved him back so hard that he fell flat on the bed, knees bent, feet touching the floor, naked except for the uniform and briefs around his ankles. He was panting as the pleasure pounded through his veins, but his mind was starting to work again. A hot flush spread over his face and neck. He felt ridiculous.

“Look at you,” Loki sneered, “Captain America, a fine example for American youth. I’m the one who brought the Chitauri to New York. You let me strip you, touch you. You want me to take you. How humiliating.” He bent and took one of Steve’s nipples between thumb and forefinger and squeezed, savoring the expression on Steve’s face. He knelt over Steve’s body and planted a lingering kiss on his forehead. “Now that you know what I am,” he whispered, “forget me.” And he was gone.

The shame of it hit Steve with a rush of adrenaline like a gut punch. He had let Loki toy with him while the Avengers were still out there looking for him. Once again Steve had been disloyal to his team, and all because he was in love with Loki—in love with a man who just wanted to hurt him, disgrace him, who didn’t care a mite for all they’d seemed to share.

Sitting up, he struggled to pull off his boots, then his uniform and briefs. The uniform was stained with his semen, and he couldn’t bear to see it that way, to know how he had let it be profaned. Steve knew he had to get out of here, but his panicked mind resorted to familiar routines, tidying up, putting things in order. He stuffed his uniform into the washer and set it going with a full measure of soap. His torn undershirt went into the trash, and he stepped into the shower and turned the hot water up high, scrubbing at his skin as if he could rub away what had happened, what he had let happen. Then he sat in the corner of the shower with his head in his hands until the water ran cold and he was shivering hard, chilled to his core, but he couldn’t burn it out, and he couldn’t freeze it out. He had to face who he was, what he liked, and the humiliation he had allowed himself to be subjected to. And he knew himself well enough to know that he would think of it later secretly and that it would turn him on, and he would wish for it to happen again.

When he left Stark Tower, he didn’t take much, just a small bag with a few clothes. His uniforms he left hanging in the closet. They were all immaculate, even the last one he had worn, with meticulous stitching repairing the places Loki had torn in his haste to pull it off him. His shield he left hanging from its hook on the wall. He wrote a brief message on a piece of paper and left it lying on his bedside table with his card key to the tower. He probably should have left a message with Jarvis, but he hadn’t wanted to speak to anyone.

The world would have to do without Captain America for a while. Steve Rogers had a few things he needed to sort out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will begin putting up Part II soon. There are three parts. Thanks for reading!


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